The Haunted
by esmeralda312
Summary: Bonnie Bennett is dead. Life goes on in Mystic Falls, but despite being the first to jump onto the let's-sacrifice-the-judgy-little-witch bandwagon, Damon Salvatore is not the same. Isolated and forlorn in the cold Virginia winter, he sees signs of her everywhere. Is she reaching out to him from the Other Side? Can he bring her back? - Takes place after 2x21 (ish).
1. 01 Prologue

******Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**

_**Chapter Soundtrack: The Civil Wars – The Violet Hour**_

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_Prologue: _

**The dread he felt to** see her lifeless body crumpled on the rocky ground of the quarry was to be expected.

Sure, they fought all the time, and sure, if asked they would both vehemently subscribe to the idea that the only emotion between them was intense loathing. But over the months of working together, they had come to an understanding, a begrudging mutual respect.

Secretly, on the night that she had faked her death at the decades dance, he had surprised himself and hoped to never see her like that again. So it made sense that he would feel the clench of anguish in his chest for a fallen ally.

But days later, grief still gripped his insides tight.

Having a conversation with Stefan and Elena, he tossed out a snarky comment and caught himself glancing over his shoulder to enjoy her displeased snarl. The ensuing silence was deafening to the vampire, who was disappointed to realize that no one was left to volley him any type of worthwhile resistance.

Weeks later, his turmoil had found an unwelcome inertia, settling in his muscles with a leaden gravity. He still eyed his phone warily each time it buzzed, having grown accustomed to hearing her voice relaying the latest setback in their master plans to save her best friend.

Months went by, and he found no appeasement.

How could he, who had been the first to jump onto the let's-sacrifice-the-judgy-little-witch bandwagon, be the one to miss her presence so much? Even Caroline's tears had finally stemmed as life marched on in the miserable town Bonnie Bennett had saved yet again.

_**He mulled over the platter**__ of strawberries, selecting only one. Plump and succulent, its sanguine flesh was swathed in a cocoon of dark chocolate. He brought the berry to his lips, and his teeth cracked through the bittersweet chocolate to expose the pocked surface of the fruit to his languid tongue._

_He felt her behind him before he saw her._

_When he finally turned, he expected to find the witch in her plum cardigan and blouse ensemble, what she had worn the last time he'd attended this same wake at the Lockwood mansion and had this same confrontation with her in their overwrought dining room. Instead, she wore a loose, flowing gown of some soft ivory fabric. Her hair tumbled in waves over her shoulders, framing a silver amulet clasped about her throat._

_"Don't you want to know why the Lockwoods were affected by the device?" Her tone, however, remained as it was in his memory._

_This was where he was supposed to bring up _her_ role in the Lockwoods being affected by the device, kicking off the chain of events that led to Caroline's admission to the hospital and Papa Lockwood's fiery demise. He was supposed to be piling onto what he'd always known was a powerful guilt building inside her. But somehow the words wouldn't come._

_He felt a now-familiar tug in his chest. He missed this, her bravado and earnest righteousness. He missed her green eyes glaring at him, unwavering._

_"What do you know about regret, Judgy?" he eventually asked before popping the rest of the strawberry into his mouth._

_"What are you talking about? Quit changing the subject, Damon," she demanded._

_He shrugged and walked around the table, knowing she would follow close behind. "I mean, have you ever just… let something happen and then wished you could go back and never have done it at all?"_

_She stopped short, and a small distance fell between them before he too stopped and turned to face her again. Her eyes cast downward, she answered him._

_"If you're getting at the fact that I didn't de-spell the device, you'd be wrong." She lifted her head to stare at him directly. "I'm not happy about this, but it was the right thing to do. If I hadn't, all those tomb vampires would still be out there, and they would have killed a lot of people that night."_

_Her voice barely faltered, and Damon knew it wasn't him she was trying to convince. He shook his head._

_"That's not what I was getting at."_

_Her gown was whipping around her frame now, though he felt no breeze._

_She looked down, and he noticed a garish splotch of crimson appear over her chest, seeping into the pale bodice. It spread across the fabric, the bright stain marring the sweetheart neckline and creeping onto the windswept skirt. The heady scent of blood made his nostrils flare. Her breathing became labored, and she looked up at him in shock. He stood before her, helpless._

_The disbelief in her eyes was the only thing in his mind when he woke up._

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**A/N: Super short is allowed for a prologue, right? If you've gotten this far, thank you! I'm going to post the first chapter now too, so click on through :D R&R please, lovelies!**


	2. 02 Down to a Whisper

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**

_**Chapter Soundtrack: ****Mumford & Sons - Thistle & Weeds, **__**VAST – Lady of Dreams**_

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_**Darkness clung to the abandoned**__ house like an inky lacquer, shrouding and shielding every webbed corner and rotting beam. The floorboards creaked wearily beneath his boots, and he carefully made his way down the stairs._

_In his arms, Bonnie was still, pale, unconscious. Her ivory gown wrinkled and bunched against her frame as he pulled her close to his chest. The fabric felt soft and pristine against the skin of his forearms._

_He remembered this night, though in his memory she had worn a snug mod mini-dress and shocking carmine go-go boots. He could recall that slinky material sliding against his fingers as he spun her wildly on the dance floor. She had laughed as if surprised to be enjoying herself._

_He should have told her that he'd liked that dress._

_Yet she was luminous in this gown. Reverently, he laid her on the ground in the dark cellar of the witch house, bathed in the flickering light of countless candles that surrounded them, seeming to glow endlessly._

_Her breath was impossibly soft and her heartbeat faint. He wondered if he would be able to hear either of them if he didn't already know that they were there. He guessed not, and they were hoping that the same was true of Klaus._

_He knelt beside her, lost in the quiet serenity of her features in repose. He was filled with a sudden urgency, an impulse to not let her wake up here alone. No one who had been as brave and loyal as she had that night should be alone at the end of it._

_Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to elicit that kind of bravery and loyalty in another person. In another life, he imagined._

_He had his phone out without realizing what he was doing. This was where he was supposed to call Jeremy, filling him in on the plan and leaving the witch in the boy's eager arms._

_He looked down at her, brushing a loose tendril of hair from her face. He tucked his phone back into his pocket._

**He stood alone inside the** witch house now, the weak morning light filtering through its dusty rooms. Perhaps inspired by his dream the night before, he had come to the derelict structure without really understanding the sudden urge to be there.

The house was silent and entirely empty. The chill of Virginia winter seeped into every nook and corner of the building. A blanket of dust covered the decaying furniture and debris that littered the floors.

He found himself in the cellar, surrounded by cluttered shelves and broken candelabras. The warmth he remembered suffusing the room that night and in his dream was gone. The candles were reduced to waxy nubs, charred and lifeless at last.

He wondered what he had expected to find here, realizing with a pang of disappointment that even the spirits who had once buzzed through the house and made his life miserable were now inert.

His hands shook as disappointment flared into rage. With a violent shove, he toppled one of the rickety wooden tables, flinging candles and paper and books across the room. He lifted one of the candelabras and hurled it into the shelves, feeling no satisfaction as the rusty, eroded metal shattered.

His fist slammed into the cobblestone wall, knuckles coming away shredded and bloody.

Still, no spirit stirred.

**He couldn't forget the glassy nothingness in Klaus' eyes as the hybrid gasped his last unnecessary breath. He couldn't forget Elijah's icy rage to see his last hope shattered. **

**He couldn't forget her grimace as Elijah's hand thrust through her ribs, crushing her heart between his fingers. He couldn't forget how her blood ran angrily down her blouse, which billowed and flowed in the wind that her own magic had swept up moments before. **

**Later that evening at the** boardinghouse, Damon reclined with _The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings_ in one of the armchairs in the library, his legs stretched out across a plush ottoman. His hand had healed, and he had decided there was no point in overanalyzing the whys or hows that had led him to that house that morning. What difference would it make?

Across the room, his phone buzzed insistently from its place on the credenza, as it had for hours. He ignored it, not even able to work up enough interest to check the screen. Only one name appearing there would elicit any emotion beyond irritation, and it didn't belong to anyone with cell reception.

Besides, he already knew it was Liz Forbes. The sheriff continued to seek out his help, her calls generally professional yet panicked. More recently they were filled with a different kind of anxiety as she sincerely worried for her friend. He had stopped answering them, his interest in council business having dwindled away to nonexistence and his interest in being coddled even less accessible.

In all actuality, he was aware of the fact that supernatural trouble continued to plague Mystic Falls, as it always had and probably always would. The defeat of Klaus meant nothing to the vagabond creatures that dallied in and passed through the place, a slippery and unremitting infestation. And yet, despite the ongoing threat, the scoobies still fell apart.

Damon in time came to realize that Bonnie was the glue that had held it all together.

Stefan and Elena had found solace in one another after the traumatic events of the night of the sacrifice. Having come so near to losing her, having watched her being completely drained and her lifeless body tossed carelessly to the ground, Stefan held Elena closer than ever before. She welcomed his focus, leaning on him as a pillar of support when her grief seemed too much to bear. In under two years she had lost both of her parents, Jenna and finally Bonnie, whom she had loved as a sister. She knew without Stefan she would have drowned in her heartache, and their love drew strength from the gratitude each felt for the other.

The pair eventually decided to leave the town that had spawned so much of their sorrow over the years. Bundling a mourning Jeremy into the car with them, they left Mystic Falls behind, finally settling in a small town in North Carolina. Damon had been invited to join the great escape, but scoffed at the idea of having to witness any more of their PDA.

In reality, he found he felt little more than apathy in response to Elena's reinforced affection for his brother. He felt little more than apathy for most everything lately, to be fair. Still, with even that goal apparently abandoned, he was truly set adrift.

Meanwhile, Caroline, Tyler and Matt were around, but they weren't exactly his friends or even co-conspirators the way Bonnie had been. Honestly he had no desire at all to know how the annoying blonde vampire, the mangy dog and the useless human were getting along, let alone team up to fight supernatural crime with them.

So malevolence remained in the cursed town long after its protectors had grown too broken or too tired or too dead to battle on. It figured.

His one remaining consistent contact with the outside world was Alaric. The history teacher had taken to dragging Damon out to the Grill or an occasional club, centered by the unspoken need to distract himself from his own grief. Though his time with Jenna had been cruelly short, the affection they shared was sweeter and more pure than any he had ever known before her. He wasn't taking it well, and he couldn't help but notice that Damon wasn't doing too great either, though the cause for Damon's downward spiral was still something of a mystery to him. Elena's running off with his brother, maybe. Or residual angst from the 150 year disappointment called Katherine. Regardless, alcohol and girls and diversion were just what he knew they needed, and he saw to it that his friend got out of the house every so often to partake.

Damon for his part fulfilled his duties as Rick's drinking buddy and wingman when it was required, but he otherwise found himself not wanting to do the things he did before. Truth be told, he didn't even want to be the person he was before, though he powerlessly knew there was no evading what he was, not for long anyway.

In the meantime, he compelled a Red Cross deliveryman to regularly pilfer shipments of blood that he then hoarded in the basement. Barricading himself in the boardinghouse, he floated between the bedroom and the library day and night like some kind of listless apparition.

He realized that he had been staring at the words of the same page for quite some time, not making sense of any of it. The letters writhed and shifted in his vision, taunting him, meaningless.

He gave up, letting the book drop open across his chest. He stared blankly out the window into the grey winter landscape.

_**The clinking of glass and**__ the muted chatter of the crowd echoed dully around him. He slid into the booth across from her at the Mystic Grill, unintentionally brushing her leg under the table with his own. Dirt from his boot smudged the hem of the now-familiar ivory dress._

_She glanced up at him, one eyebrow raised as her attention was drawn from the grimoire she had been diligently reading._

_This was where he was supposed to start talking to her about the latest plan to save Elena, as they had the last time he'd slid into this booth with her. He couldn't bring himself to do it, knowing that this particular spark of genius was the one that eventually got the witch killed._

_He stared at her instead, silently wondering how he never realized back then just how beautiful she had been. How he never linked that smug contentedness she made him feel with her presence. He had been a fool all of his life, unapologetically, but nothing compared to how monumentally idiotic he had been to not really see Bonnie Bennett._

_"I'd say take a picture, but the creepy stare is weird enough as it is, Salvatore. What the hell do you want?" She frowned at him, but he could swear there was laughter in her eyes._

_He smiled in return._

_A stray eyelash fluttered across her cheek, landing at the corner of her lips. He reached across the table to brush it away, waking as the aneurysms began._

**He went back to the quarry** sometimes, usually at dusk when the light of day would slowly disappear behind the roughhewn cliffs. He just sat there with a bottle of scotch until the sun was completely extinguished.

Sometimes he talked to himself. Sometimes he talked to her.

One night, he sat there silently, leaning against the slab of rock where Klaus had drained Elena. He looked out onto the mist-shrouded valley, the daylight subdued by cold clouds.

All around him was dreary and wet. He remembered the place that night awash in the warm hues of fire, magic and blood. Now it was all just grey, even the blood having washed away with each fall and melt of snow.

He sighed and took another swig.

"You were a lousy witch after all, letting yourself get killed like some little nobody."

**He couldn't forget the way the wind whipped through her hair as she stalked towards the hybrid, each step accented by a surge of incredible power. He couldn't forget how she had looked merciless, beautiful, unstoppable.**

**He couldn't forget her eyes seeking his as she fell, her body lifeless. He couldn't forget the warmth of her corpse, as the magic that suffused her clung desperately for a few final moments before dissipating forever.**

He threw the empty bottle, and it shattered against the jagged quarry rocks.

"Well fuck you, Bonnie Bennett."

He was answered only by the silence of the still winter sky. He leaned back, tilting his head to rest against the icy stone. He felt the wind shift.

A faint voice tickled his ear as it whispered, "You wish, Salvatore."

He leapt to his feet, head whipping to the side, but no one was there.

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**A/N: So are you liking it so far? I hope so! I'm trying to keep the characters IC, but it's AU and Damon at least has been through a long period of something like grief, so they won't be exactly the same as they are on the show (you haven't seen realtime Bonnie yet, but consider this a pre-emptive disclaimer!). **

**I'm trying something a little bit different for me, but I really hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I'm enjoying writing it. This story will be updated regularly, once a week. I can make promises because I've already finished the majority of it! Hope I didn't just jinx myself. R&R please, love you guuuuys!**


	3. 03 Not Your Usual Bathtub Scene

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general.**

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek, Lenka – Like a Song**_

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**As the wind howled around** the worn eaves and ivy-blanketed brick of the old boardinghouse, Damon was reminded of how it had looked as it was being built. The winter wind had whistled then between the slatted wood supports that were buried inside the walls now. At one time they stood tall and jagged like crooked teeth, naked against the dreary Virginia sky.

The boardinghouse had been his mother's idea, her pet project, though she'd often affectionately murmured against his hair her disbelief that she found the time for such things while dealing with a handful of a child like him.

He was five or six years old when the construction of the boardinghouse began in earnest. It had taken quite some time for the stodgy old men to stop scoffing at the idea of a gentlewoman supervising the construction and management of the endeavor. Though his father handled all of the Salvatores' business dealings, Marie made her wishes clear to Guiseppe and he allowed them, his idea of spoiling his wife.

His intent to spoil his wife was also why the building took on such a less lavish tilt than the popular Greek Revival style of the time to which Guiseppe was partial, as evidenced by the grand façade and towering columns adorning their own family home. But Damon's mother had something less opulent in mind; though the boardinghouse was a sprawling structure, its demeanor was low and cozy.

Damon remembered the excitement they shared whenever he accompanied her, carrying her case of linen blueprints dutifully. He had been awed by how she took charge from those same men who had once derided her, how with her light French accent and prim ways she still managed to say just the right things to cow those who would disparage her.

Sitting in the parlor now, he knew that she would have loved the way the ivy crept along and clung to the worn brick walls of the house's exterior, as if in a placid embrace.

She attended to the boardinghouse less and less after she became pregnant again. After her death, tenants filtered through the well-appointed house for nearly a century, but to him they were nameless and faceless.

He wondered if they ever stopped to consider the woman who had once poured herself into their passing home, or if all that had remained of her to them was a serenely smiling face, luminous upon the portrait that hung over the mantel of the fireplace.

That was the thing about an old house. Rarely was an old house quite what it seemed, having touched and been touched by so many lives. He considered this when things began to happen that he couldn't explain.

The idea of ghosts had never held much appeal to him. As a card-carrying member of the eternally living dead, he had put very little thought into what could tether a soul to the earthly plane long after its body was six feet under, if such things were even possible.

Then again, also as a member of the living dead, not much seemed impossible.

It began subtly. Shadows danced in the corners of his vision that he could blink away and forget. The nagging sensation that he was forgetting something would tug at his mind incessantly.

When his things started moving around, he was forced to take more notice. Despite the impulsive nature for which he had grown infamous, at home Damon was a creature of order and routine.

When he found books tossed messily on the floor, he was puzzled. When he walked into the parlor and saw that the coffee table was pushed up against the frame of the sofa, he was annoyed. When he discovered the smashed decanter of cognac, beads of the dark liquor still glittering along the sharp edges of the crystal shards and soaking into the carpet, he was simply furious.

After dark, he lay in bed and listened to the old boardinghouse as it creaked and moaned, battered by the constant pummeling of the harsh wind. His limbs grew heavy as sleep began to claim him, but then he heard the soft sobbing as it echoed somewhere in the house.

There was something in those quiet cries that tugged at him, the sound distant and yet pervasive.

His bare feet padded silently down the empty corridors. Skittering noises taunted him, scratching persistently at the distant ends of the dark hallways, seeming to move farther away every time he drew near. He listened carefully but did not hear the betraying faint heartbeat of whatever small rodent he had expected.

Finally, the weeping was nothing but a foggy memory, and he had to conclude that he was alone.

He climbed back into his bed, resigned, as the wind wailed outside.

_**The nettlesome buzz of his**__ phone escaped from his pocket as he, Stefan, and Bonnie made their way into the ruins of the tomb._

_"I didn't know what she was planning," Rose's voice hummed unhappily on the other end of the line._

_"Stay there, we'll take care of it."_

_He was supposed to rush to intercept Elena's suicide mission now. Instead, he called Stefan over. He explained the situation and sent him to retrieve his own kamikaze girlfriend. Damon for his part followed Bonnie down the uneven stone steps, noticing how the skirt of her gown trailed behind her._

_"So Baby Gilbert chickened out then?" He recited his line without verve. Though he hadn't been present for the big reveal the first time around, he already knew where Jeremy was. For some reason, he just wanted to hear her voice, speaking to him._

_"He said he would be here," she replied distractedly. She pulled candles from her satchel and set them in a ring, using a stick to trace a pentagram in the dirt floor to connect them._

_They both noticed at the same time as Katherine slinked forward out of the darkness, stopping at the barrier that blocked the entrance to the tomb. Clutched in her arms, Jeremy grunted weakly. The copious blood splattered across his mangled neck explained why the vampire wasn't the shriveled, shambling mess they had expected._

_Damon angrily considered that idiotic plan-making must run in the Gilbert family genetic code._

_When he turned to look at Bonnie, she was frantic. Her eyes wide with panic, she clutched her grimoire and croaked, "Let him go."_

_Katherine's lip curled haughtily, and her eyes rolled to the ceiling as if considering. "Hmmm, I don't think so. Hey, I have a better idea. How about you drop the barrier, or sweet honey boy here gets the rest of his throat ripped out?" She smiled cruelly._

_It wasn't her best spellwork, he had to admit. She was frazzled and scared for Jeremy, though it hardly seemed like much of a loss to him, and as the words tumbled from her lips he already knew it wouldn't work. She wobbled on her feet at the end of the incantation, opening her eyes slowly._

_Katherine tapped a finger against the intact barrier and sneered. As the dark veins wriggled around the vampire's eyes and her fangs descended, Bonnie shouted, "Wait!"_

_Katherine stood still in mid vamp-out, eyebrow raised._

_"I can do this, let me try again." There was determination in her eyes now, the monstrous face that looked so much like her best friend's spurring her somehow._

_Jeremy groaned in Katherine's rough embrace. "Don't, Bonnie, it's too much. You're not strong enough."_

_Damon frowned._

_"I can do this," Bonnie repeated, clutching an unfamiliar chain and dog tags in her hand as she closed her eyes once more._

_Katherine laughed, mockingly. Damon knew she was expecting to finish her meal any moment now._

_Offhandedly, he considered what he ever saw in the woman, why he was obsessed with her all those years. It went beyond the fact that she was so daring for a seemingly young lady living under the conventions of that age, though that certainly had had its appeal. _

_In her, he saw a kindred spirit. Someone else who was wrong and out of place. She owned the fact that she wasn't quite right, she was confident in her privilege to be so. That was intoxicating, he remembered._

_He felt then that she must empathize better than anyone else with how broken it could make a person feel to be considered wicked by others, particularly the ones who are supposed to know and love you better than to make such judgments. And she had somehow found a way to hold her head above all of that._

_And he knew that she appreciated better than anyone else the lurid pleasure that indulging in that wickedness could bring. _

_He thought that she could see and understand every aspect of him in a way no one else ever would. He believed they were matched in each of those aspects. He had been wrong._

_Looking at her now, her face twisted into a harsh, fanged sneer, he couldn't see himself in her anymore._

_He wasn't sure if that was because he was feeling less depraved, or because he saw now that she was so much more depraved than he'd ever let himself comprehend._

_He figured it must be the latter, which would explain why he would have found her more virtuous doppelganger to be such a temptation. Still, it was a hollow love, wrought originally by his own self-loathing and in the end clung to simply for the sake of having something to cling to after over a century of clinging alone._

_His thoughts were interrupted by the jolt of fear that swept over him as the witch let out a cry of pain. The heady scent of her blood overwhelmed him as it ran down her face in coursing, crimson rivulets._

_She collapsed to the ground, and as Damon rushed to her side he heard Katherine sinking her fangs into the screaming Gilbert boy._

**He awoke to chaos. The** acrid scent of fire and char permeated everything around him, and his eyes flew open to find the bed engulfed in flames. The crackling roar of the inferno resonated violently in his ears.

He leapt up, but before he could snuff the flames with a healthy beating from his pillow, the blaze had vanished and the bed was completely unmarred.

He slumped back onto the edge of the mattress and found it completely cool to the touch. Somehow he felt exhausted despite having just woken from a full night of sleep.

**A few nights later, Alaric** convinced him to go out with him to the bar. He had given the history teacher excuses for weeks, but his friend was determined to drag them both out of their respective funks despite all evidence pointing to the likelihood that such a feat was impossible.

Smothered by the haze of smoke and the squirming desperation of the small town night life, to Damon the whole thing quickly began to seem a farce.

Alaric had already found a cute brunette, and they chatted at the far end of the bar. His friend leaned obliviously towards the woman as he spoke, and the woman smiled.

Damon looked out onto the dance floor and caught the curious eye of one of the girls there. She sent him a shy smile before twisting her hips back into the dance, laughing as her sleek black hair fanned around her. She was encircled by friends, but her gaze drifted back to him in due course.

How many times could you execute this charade over and over? he wondered. It was a matter of going through the motions now: the crooked smirk, the flirtatious raised brow inviting her to join him. The seemingly earnest smile when she moved to do so.

How can a person be defined by something so predictable, so easy? He'd had over a century to hone and perfect his methods of seduction, of predation. It made him a master of the game, but more recently it also made him utterly bored with it. Still, in the end, he knew he would play it anyway.

She said her name was Anjali, sipping the gin and tonic he had paid for. When he led her back onto the dark dance floor, he sensed the rush of her heartbeat as he pulled her close, his hips swaying with hers. He felt her arms as they wrapped around his neck, and his hands made their way to the small of her back, his restless fingers teasing lower and lower as they moved together.

Her skin was supple, and the soothing fragrance of vanilla and sandalwood pulled him away from the smog of the setting for just a moment as he leaned down to brush his cheek against her neck.

She jumped as his teeth dragged across her pristine skin, and he felt her body tense with a nervous giggle.

It was who he was, and he couldn't do anything about that.

_**The din of the parade**__ was overwhelming, the children's squeals and the jovial noise of the gathered people competing with bright bursts of fanfare as a battalion of gaudy floats drifted lazily down the street._

_He sent his brother and Elena a smug little wave as they stood with their plastered-on smiles atop one of the floats, before turning to see her standing in the crowd where he knew she would be._

_She seemed a vision, still like a statue in her ivory gown amidst the lively throng of people. The fabric wafted gently in the warm summer breeze. She turned to leave as he took a step towards her. "Where are you going?"_

_She didn't even bother to turn her glare onto him, her anger directed instead onto the path ahead of her as she replied. "Away from you."_

_"Hey, hang on." He grabbed her wrist, and she spun around to face him, fury dancing in her eyes._

_"Leave me alone, Damon."_

_"Thank you." He gazed sincerely into her face as it softened with surprise. "The Gilbert device could have hurt me, and yet you de-spelled it."_

_He caught the glimmer of guilt as it appeared and immediately vanished from her face, this time around._

_When she was apparently speechless, he continued. "I'm sorry… for everything. I never intended for anything I did to hurt you. I wish it hadn't. You have every reason in the world to hate me, but somehow you decided I was worth saving."_

_She stared at him, astounded, before finally finding her voice again. "I didn't do it for you."_

_"Still, I'm very grateful."_

_Her eyes drifted down to where his thumb was rubbing circles into the soft skin on the back of her hand. She glanced back up into his face, appearing somehow lost, and she pulled out of his grasp and walked away._

**The next morning, he woke** as the wan sunlight of dawn washed over the room.

He tried to remember the name of the girl in his arms, but he couldn't. He looked down at her, his gaze trailing from her soft black hair to the bite marks he had left on the golden skin of her neck to her bare breasts pressed sinfully against his pale torso. His luxurious sheets clung to every curve of her body.

His eye was drawn to a splash of color on his nightstand. A necklace had been carelessly tossed there, its long strands of gold strung with turquoise beads.

He remembered a similar one wrapped haphazardly around the neck of Bonnie's corpse. He had carefully unwrapped and removed it at the time, eventually handing it to Elena when she woke up but Bonnie didn't.

He wondered where it was now.

Suddenly the necklace on the nightstand and the girl it belonged to were making his skin crawl. He reached over to grab the discarded jewelry and nudged the sleeping girl awake.

His eyes were intent on hers, which were heavily lidded with sleep and what was sure to be an unforgiving hangover. "I'm going to take a bath. By the time I come back out, you will be gone. You'll forget about last night, only remembering that you had a random fling that was fun but will never happen again."

She nodded mutely, getting up to gather her clothes. He held the necklace out to her, and she took it from him with a dazed smile.

He climbed out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. Standing before the mirror, he eyed his reflection as it was quickly shrouded by white condensation. He didn't look a day older than he did the night that his father shot him in the chest, but at some point a weariness had crept into those wickedly blue eyes that no one could resist. Well, almost no one.

When the tub was full of hot bubbly water, he lowered himself into it with a sigh.

He inhaled the lightly scented steam that hung thick in the room, beams of light from the window struggling to refract through it. He leaned his head back and let his mind wander.

**He couldn't forget the tranquil beauty of her face in the darkness of the decrepit witch house as she held her hands to either side of Johnathan Gilbert's head, casting the spell that would save her best friend's life at that quarry just hours later. **

**He couldn't forget the strange look she gave him as they drove towards the quarry, when he asked her if she could survive this alone if Elijah left them out to dry. He couldn't forget the flicker of warmth in her eyes when he pointed out that she didn't have to go it alone, that witches are not the only ones with power flowing through their veins.**

**He couldn't forget her lips on his wrist, drawing his blood with an unexpected lack of fear or hesitation. He couldn't forget her scent as he buried his face into the crook of her neck, warm with teasing hints of citrus, honey, and sage, as his fangs extended to consummate the bond. **

Gentle splashing echoed in the cavernous bathroom as the water in his tub was disturbed. He groaned without lifting his head or opening his eyes.

Didn't he tell her to go? Just because he said "by the time I come back out" didn't mean she should stay until then. This girl really needed to learn how to take a hint.

He felt smooth legs slip into the water, sliding against his as she sat on the other side of the tub from him.

Her lithe fingers traced circles over the skin of his submerged feet. He sighed. Lingering with the scent of the bubble bath, he smelled citrus, honey and sage.

That wasn't the girl. That was Bonnie.

His eyes flew open. There was no one sitting in the tub with him. He jumped out and ran to the door, trailing suds and water across the cold tiles.

The bedroom was empty, and the girl with the forgotten name was long gone.

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**A/N: You guys are so fantastic, thank you for your awesome reviews and to everyone who followed and favorited! I hope you liked the update :D**

**And yes, in some of the books (the Stefan series), the Salvatore's mother was a Frenchwoman. I didn't just make it up, I promise.**

**And you guys, YOU GUYS, last week's episode? Somebody just roll me off the nearest cliff because I can't even. I've already gif-ed that hug at least 8 separate times, no joke.**

**For the anon reviewers, since I can't PM you guys… Kaykay: **Thank you! Hope you enjoyed this one too!** lizzie: **You'll be seeing Bonnie in realtime very soon! Til then, there's still Bamon happening, it's just a little… subtle ;) Hope you liked this one! **Guest1:** Thanks! :D **Guest2:** Thank you so much, that's exactly how I was hoping it would feel! We'll just have to wait and see how much Damon enjoys being haunted ;) Hope you liked the new chapter!

**I was going to update on Tuesdays, but apparently patience is not my strong suit? So now I'm saying Mondays, but if I get impatient again then it may become Sundays and so on, lol. Please R&R, love you guys! :D**


	4. 04 The Stardust of a Song

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Pan's Labyrinth – Long, Long Time Ago (especially the end of the chapter, but really just put it on repeat and sooooak it all in, it could be the soundtrack for the whole fic)**_

* * *

_**She stood alone, at the**__ center of a large pentagram of fire. Around her, the forest was dark beyond the harsh glare of the blaze, and heavy winds swept at the dead leaves and brush littering the ground._

_Flames licked at the hem of her gown, the warm glow casting shadows over the pale material._

_He had heard Emily's strong voice shouting, "Incendia!" Yet when he looked at her, he saw none of that woman's aloof confidence behind those green eyes._

_Bonnie looked frightened, and tears streaked down her cheeks._

_"Help me. Please, Damon!"_

_He stepped towards her, and the flames roared threateningly higher. He blinked against the flare of heat and light, and as his vision cleared, he realized that Bonnie had vanished._

**There was no way this** was a good idea. Nevertheless, the vampire climbed out of his car and walked up the path to the Bennett house.

The odds were not good that her father would even be home. The odds had never been good before at least, but he was quickly running out of options. He needed to find out if anyone else was experiencing anything similar to the unexplainable incidents quickly piling up at the boardinghouse, and he knew that if anyone was, it would be her father.

Damon was beginning to feel like Bonnie was reaching out to him.

Rudy Hopkins was surprisingly available, groggily opening the door at 11am in creased sweatpants. When the vampire asked if he could speak to him about Bonnie, he flinched at her name but then scowled and invited Damon inside. His voice was gruff, as if he was no longer accustomed to speaking aloud.

Damon eyed the disorderly living room, crushed beer cans cluttering the floor from the stairs to the couch, and he wondered what the place had looked like when Bonnie was alive. He'd never been inside then.

It turned out that in the end Bonnie's father had been unable to leave the house his daughter had lived in practically alone. Ever since she died, he felt bound to the place in a way he had apparently never experienced while she was still breathing. He stopped attending work, and by the look and odor of the man and the house, Damon could tell he spent most of his time drinking and/or not showering.

They walked into the kitchen. Awkwardly, and without any prompting from the vampire, Rudy admitted that at night he would stand in her closet, smelling what was left of her scent on the dusty clothes that hung there, abandoned. "I should have..." Rudy began, but stopped himself.

Damon frowned, feeling strangely tentative.

"So it feels like she's still here, right? That's why you stand in there?"

It wasn't like him to beat around the bush, and the bizarre hesitance was graceless, leaving an unpleasant taste in his mouth. But something about the man seemed barely held together, his seams loose and fraying.

"I guess." He extended his arm, offering his guest a mug of weak coffee across the kitchen counter. When Damon declined, he shrugged and gulped some of it down himself as they returned to the living room.

The vampire was beginning to wonder just how useless of an idea this had been after all. "What I mean is… do you ever feel like Bonnie's still here?"

His shoulders tensed. "What are you talking about?"

"Like, she's trying to talk to you or something?"

"Is this funny to you? Are you getting some kind of sick pleasure out of this?" Rudy's face was reddened with anger, and Damon's idle musing on the wisdom of his plan was quickly being answered.

"No. Look, I don't mean any harm."

"Sheila is gone. My wife is lost. My daughter is _dead_. And you don't mean any harm. What gives you of all people the right to come in here and mock me?" He was agitated, his hands balled into tightly clenched fists as he paced before the coffee table.

Damon growled in frustration, low in his throat. "I'm not making fun of you. Forget it, I'll just go."

The man's voice grew louder and increasingly desperate as Damon turned to walk towards the door. "Oh, you'll just go? Okay, great! Must be nice! I'd hate to _inconvenience_ you after what you did."

Damon spun back around to face the man once more. "What _I_ did?"

"Yeah, what you did, you worthless bloodsucker. I never wanted her mixed up in any of that magic bullshit! But you fucks had some stupid vendetta to settle, so I lost her." His voice cracked at the end of his tirade, and he threw his mug down on the coffee table. The blue ceramic shattered, shards flying in every direction.

Damon felt a pang of guilt then, but it was swiftly overcome by a surge of anger. Who was this man to suddenly have so many accusations to hurl around? He was never there for Bonnie when she was alive. What did he know?

No one forced Bonnie to do anything. She was a hero, not a victim.

He stepped towards Bonnie's father to give him a piece of his mind, which possibly would involve his fist wrapped tight around the man's throat, when the bulbs affixed to the creaking ceiling fan above them began to flicker.

Rudy looked up nervously. "What are you doing?"

Damon was silent, his rage still simmering. He wasn't doing anything.

With a hiss, the lights in the room shorted out, plunging the pair of them into the dimness produced by the heavy curtains covering every window.

A pale, shapeless mist slowly gathered between the human and the vampire, roiling and spreading hypnotically.

Both men stood motionless, their anger forgotten as they were paralyzed by the sight before them.

The mist touched Rudy's skin and he flushed as if warmed by the contact. The hapless man didn't appear to notice as tears fell from his stunned eyes.

Damon watched breathlessly, unable to explain what he was seeing.

Then it dissipated, leaving them both in the darkness.

Rudy Hopkins fell to his knees, unable to stem his tears once they began to flow. Damon backed away wordlessly and walked out of the house, shaken and somehow drained.

**He couldn't forget the curl of the fingers of her outstretched hand as she focused her power on a screaming Klaus, nor the way the omnipotent hybrid scrambled backwards fearfully as she broke every bone in his body. **

**He couldn't forget the satisfying crack of Greta's neck as he played his part, then turned and saw her determinedly stalking through fire and wind and storm. He couldn't forget the fleeting lull where he watched her in awe, truly for the first time seeing the wild and raw beauty of the power she wielded in her fragile human body, before collecting Elena and taking her pallid, drained corpse to Stefan. **

**"A mist…?" Stefan's voice crackled** on the other end of the line.

"Yeah, it was unbelievable."

His brother's silence seemed to indicate that he agreed with that assessment.

Damon generally made it a rule not to confide in Stefan if at all possible, but the recent events were tearing his mind to shreds. He needed to tell someone, at the very least to stop feeling as if everything was trapped in his head.

"Have you thought any more about moving out here with us? There's a spare bedroom with your name on it." Stefan made an effort to keep his tone light, but Damon could easily sense the brooding concern that lurked beneath.

"You don't believe me."

"No, it's not that."

"Then what?"

Stefan sighed. "Damon, you've always had to fixate on some girl you can't have… this just really takes the cake."

"Seriously? You want to go there right now?"

"No, I don't. Just… look, you need to get past this. Come down here with us. It's easy to get bogged down by Mystic Falls."

"That's the difference between you and me, Stefan," he spat bitterly. "I don't run and hide."

"Damon…"

"No, forget it." He ended the call, hurling the phone onto his bed with an angry _thwap_.

A chill crept along the length of his spine.

He turned around, and Bonnie was standing before him. She wore the same cardigan and tattered blouse that she was wearing on the night of the sacrifice, caked in mud and quarry dust. Blood dripped down her face from where it was matted in her hair.

"Damon. Please." Her green eyes were wild with fear. He took a step towards her, his hand outstretched cautiously as if he was approaching a wounded animal.

"Bonnie?"

She vanished.

He collapsed to his knees, exhausted.

_**The chains were heavy, rattling**__ in his arms as he pulled them out of the old duffel bag._

_The three of them were in the parlor of the boardinghouse. He smiled to remember her snarl of disgust when he admitted that they were laying out the tarp beneath their captive because he didn't want to mess up the carpet. _

_It was a very expensive carpet, after all. People always seemed to forget that._

_He turned and made his way towards them, watching as her hands hovered around the head of an unconscious Mason Lockwood._

_The werewolf was a broad, bulky man. He dwarfed the witch, even as he sat senseless before her. She seemed unafraid however, wedged between his knees, her sole focus on delving through the contents of his mind._

_Her eyes were closed as she concentrated, and Damon frowned to notice a streak of red marring the skirt of her usually pristine ivory gown._

_"It's dark… somewhere cold…" She opened her eyes and glanced at him. "What are we looking for again, Damon?"_

_Wait, that's not what she was supposed to say._

_He opened his mouth to question her, but at that same moment the werewolf awoke and plunged his fist into her chest. The familiar, sickening sound of cracking ribs and ripping flesh echoed through his mind._

_"No!" He heard his own voice, distant and disconnected from himself. This wasn't what happened, this wasn't right._

_Her eyes widened and then began to dim, as she stared at him sadly._

**He lay in bed, eyes** irrefutably open. The cloudy night cloaked his bedroom in darkness, but he was too unnerved to fall back asleep. There was something different about that dream. Nothing ever changed unless he changed. That was how it was supposed to be.

At first he couldn't quite differentiate it from the howling of the wind outside, but eventually he heard it. Faint music filled his ears until it was all he could sense, the creaking of the house and violent night winds fading in his mind.

It was her.

She had hummed for him once before. That night when Klaus would eventually try to kill her from within Alaric's body, as the final strains of "Last Kiss" melted into some generic slow dance, she had moved to walk away from him.

He had held onto her wrist then, pulling her back in. "One more dance, Judgy."

"Damon…" she began, her tone a clear warning.

"You can't just leave when we're getting along so well." She rolled her eyes as he winked, but she stayed.

Her head rested against his chest as they swayed together, and he was surprised that she allowed him to hold her so close.

Her voice had drifted up to his ears, beautiful and sweet. It mingled with the song, falling and tripping with the soft melody.

He barely noticed as the minutes slipped away. Soon Jeremy stood behind them, his eyes hard and mistrusting, and she slipped back into the Gilbert boy's arms without a parting glance.

Her song now was eerie, melancholy. It swelled and faded with the wind, seeming to echo from nowhere and everywhere at once.

He never doubted that it was really her. He knew it must have made him crazy that he never doubted it, it must have made him pathetic that he needed so badly for it to be her, but he did. He was at a loss, though, for what he could help her with or how he could make her appear again.

* * *

**A/N: Hope you like****d it! ****I did say that patience wasn't my forte, right? I was planning to post earlier, actually, but apparently "not spilling entire glasses of water across my laptop" isn't my forte either. So both my laptop and I had slight meltdowns and now some of my keys don't work anymore, but I can copy/paste my d's from other places so it's all good? LOL. I'm a mess. ANYWAY.**

**Not even going to pretend there's going to be a weekly schedule anymore. This means that the next update could happen AT ANY TIME (more likely sooner than later though, lbr). It's a brave new world we traverse together. I guess it's not that ****different from the less brave, ol****der worl****d of before.**

**No guest reviews this time, so everybody got PMs. That never happens! Thanks for all your awesome reviews and for favoriting/following. I'm not even kidding, it totally makes my day every time I get an alert. Please R&R, love you guuuuuys!**


	5. 05 Sea of Waking Dreams

_**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**_

_**Chapter Soundtrack: Pan's Labyrinth - A Book of Blood, A Fine Frenzy – Last of Days**_

* * *

**He couldn't forget the tug of her magic wrenching inside of him as she neared exhausting her own reserves and needed him. He couldn't forget the pride he felt at knowing she was still alive because of him, muted by the strange pull on his strength. **

**He cursed himself for acting** out of what was surely stupidity, on the evening that he finally purchased and brought home the Ouija board.

It had been three days since her lullaby had whispered through the dark corridors after she appeared in and vanished from his bedroom, and Damon was desperately uneasy. There had been no sign of her.

That night, he stood on the front stoop, staring up into the clear winter sky. The darkness was still and silent, and blanketing the landscape was soft snow that would turn to slush at daybreak. Even the usually restless wind was absent. He knew the eerie hush was probably due to the season and the hibernation patterns of the creatures of Mystic Falls, but part of him couldn't help feeling that the old house itself and everything around it was tensed in some kind of anticipation.

The silence of the cold, starlit night seemed to be one unified held breath.

He lit votives and tealights on every surface of the parlor, bringing them in from every corner of the house. A pile of fat tallow candles pilfered from the attic may have been nearly as old as the vampire himself, and they served to encircle the board in its place on the coffee table.

He set the planchette on the board between "Yes" and "No," shaking his head at the depths of nonsense he now plumbed in his anxiety to see her again.

He settled onto the couch and leaned forward, placing his fingers on the plastic planchette gingerly.

"Bonnie, are you there?"

There was no response.

"Can you hear me? Just push this little plastic thing around if you can."

He grimaced as nothing happened. Melting tallow dripped onto the cherry wood of the table. He should have put down a cloth or something, he thought vaguely.

"Are you trying to talk to me? Are you the one I keep hearing at night?"

Silence.

"You got something against a man getting a full night's sleep? Judgy?"

He continued for fifteen minutes before he began to get truly annoyed.

"Come on, witch. I know it's been you all this time."

"Do something, make the stupid thing move!"

"Are you just messing with me?"

Still nothing.

"How am I supposed to help you if you don't tell me what to do?"

"Damn it, Sabrina. If you want to talk, then come on! Let's talk already!"

He was standing now, the useless board forgotten. He shouted into the empty room, but the only response he received was the crackling of the fire in the hearth.

It wasn't working. It wouldn't work, he realized.

"Fucking hell, witch, why didn't you come back? My blood was in your system, you had absolutely _no_ damn right to not come back!"

He fell back onto the couch, his head buried in his hands as they dragged through his hair in frustration. His hands stopped their motion as faint, broken whispering surrounded him.

He lifted his head as the planchette began to spin. It toppled off the board and fell to the ground, where it stopped moving. A rustle of air drew his attention back up, and Bonnie stood before him on the other side of the coffee table.

Her face was still covered in blood, and he could see the holes in the fabric of her blouse from Elijah's fingers. He stared up at her, suddenly finding there was nothing he could think of to say.

She looked relieved, but worry creased into her brow. "You have to remember this, Damon. Never forget this feeling."

"What does that mean?"

"It's how you let me in, when you pull this way on the door and I push that way."

He climbed to his feet, his knees feeling strangely weak. His mouth was dry. "Are you… are you safe? Are you happy?"

A small smile tugged at her lips, and she mused, "You _would_ only start worrying about me after I was already dead."

He rubbed the back of his neck. He wasn't dreaming, and it wasn't a trick. This was the witch he knew.

Her smile faded. "My safety isn't the issue. I need your help."

"Why? With what?"

"You have to bring me back, it isn't over." Her form flickered.

"Wait, what?"

Her eyes were luminous, translucent, wide. They were the last thing he saw as she faded away.

"Wait!"

He tried to remember the feeling from before, tried to recreate that wild, frantic need to see her, but she didn't reappear.

He kept trying as minutes passed, maybe hours. Finally he grabbed the Ouija board from the coffee table and launched it furiously at the wall before crumpling back onto the couch.

_**A warm, metallic bliss filled**__ his mouth and slid languidly down his throat. _

_His fingers curled into his prey's hair, pulling at the soft tresses to give himself better access to the supple crook of neck where his fangs were already embedded. His tongue swept across the weeping skin as he sank further in, drinking even more deeply._

_This was heaven._

_There was a certain amount of skill involved in properly tapping a vein. His senses allowed him the accuracy required, that intoxicating, pulsing rush of blood easily evident beneath a flimsy layer of skin and flesh. Then it was a matter of sliding his fangs in, neat and effortless. The caress of his lips on his victim's neck was an act of intimacy, an act of gratitude, as he began the slow draw. And that steady pull would bring him to where he was now: ecstasy._

_The cool summer night was alive around him, the breeze stirring past shivering branches, enveloping hunter and meal in a sweet embrace. _

_He mutedly heard Stefan shouting somewhere behind him. Strong hands wrenched him off of his prey, tossing him aside. His back slammed into the trunk of a tree, hard enough to crack a deep fracture into the wood._

_He blinked, looking down at the leaf-littered forest floor where Bonnie's still body lay._

_Blood streaked across her collarbone from where the flesh of her neck was mangled and torn. Mangled and torn from the punishing grip of his fangs._

_Stefan bent over her. "She's still alive, barely."_

_He shoved his brother aside, tearing into his own wrist with his still extended fangs. He leaned down to bring his bleeding wrist to her mouth to heal her._

_Her eyes flew open as he reached towards her, and he was shocked by the luminous green glow. Her hand fluttered up to grasp the collar of his jacket roughly._

_"It isn't over, Damon."_

**He strode up the steep** driveway, glancing back at his Camaro. He had decided to seek help, not knowing where one would even start when looking to resurrect a dead witch.

Zora Bennett had lived in Atlanta all her life. She'd been married twice, had 3 children, and now she had 7 grandbabies. She'd grown up in the heart of the Bennett family, cradled in magic and tradition. Being a witch wasn't a gift or a curse for Zora, it was simply the only life she'd ever been raised to know. The binding ties of the Bennett family… she'd learned long ago that they were the real gift.

Her short, silver bob curled in at her chin, framing large grey eyes that blinked slowly like a cat as she observed the man standing on her doorstep.

"Can't say I'm glad to see you here."

"Can't say I'm glad to be here."

"Well, alright. Come on in, I'll put on some coffee."

Zora's house was cozy and cluttered with pictures of family and tchotchkes that proclaimed her the #1 Grandma. Damon picked up a small angel figurine, drawing his finger over its sculpted black curls. He set it back down and sat at the kitchen table.

When he declined her offered slice of lemon chiffon cake, Zora clearly disapproved of his choice. She poured two mugs of coffee and joined him at the table. "Now, why are you here after so long?"

Damon held the proffered mug, but did not drink. "Do you know about Bonnie Bennett?

Zora clucked her tongue thoughtfully. "That flighty Abby is my cousin. Poor girl, every daughter needs her mother." She shook her head.

Damon put his mug down on the table, obscuring southeast Asia on the world map placemat set before him. He dragged his hand through his hair. "Do you know that Bonnie Bennett is dead?"

Zora set down her mug as well and stared at the vampire, her eyes glistening. "What? But she's just a child."

Damon shifted in his seat. Drawing this conversation out was the last thing he wanted to do. "Look, I think Bonnie's trying to contact me from the Other Side. She said I have to bring her back."

Zora looked at him carefully, suspiciously, but she said nothing.

"I need you to help me talk to her and figure out what's going on." His hands were flat on the table, and he returned her look with his icy blue eyes.

The corners of her mouth turned down slightly. "You're different now."

"Can you help or not?"

The silver-haired witch sighed. "I'll try."

**That night, they performed a** séance in Zora's living room. She had him push the furniture into the corners of the room, while she laid out a wide circle of votive candles. She inhaled sharply, and each candle was lit with a soft _whoosh_. In the center of the ring, she placed a shallow bowl containing the necessary crushed herbs and oils.

"Come here." She held a knife from the kitchen, and Damon raised an eyebrow at her without moving.

"If Bonnie's really able to reach out to you, there must be some bond between you that she's exploiting." The witch threw the vampire a piercing glance, which the vampire ignored. "I can attempt to strengthen that bond if I can find it to access it."

"Peachy." Damon deadpanned. He stepped forward and allowed Zora to slice a long cut across his palm. She dripped the blood into the bowl and released him, allowing him to take his place at the edge of the ring of candles. She moved to stand beside him, the herbs and blood set alight by a small waggle of her fingers.

"You need to make contact and hold on for as long as you can."

"I'll never let go, Jack. Got it."

He closed his eyes when she instructed him to, listening to her wordless murmuring as it ebbed and flowed like a tide in his mind. The scent of the charring herbs was acrid, filling his nostrils with an unforgiving ache.

"I don't think it's working."

"Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?" Her voice was soft.

He opened his eyes to see her at last. Bonnie sat on the opposite side of the candle ring, her shredded blouse trembling in some unfelt breeze.

"You know I never met Aunt Zora. I just saw Christmas cards on Grams' fridge sometimes."

The grey-eyed witch in question continued her chanting, unaware of their conversation.

"Why me?" he asked finally.

"The blood bond. It connected us, and when I died, some of me was still tied to you."

"Was that some kind of one way street? Shouldn't some of me have been tied to you too then?"

She shook her head, catching the implication of his words. "My body was an empty husk. The plan was to take on Klaus at his most vulnerable, but it put me in the same position. So much of my spirit was used killing Klaus and the rest was so dissipated by the spells I was casting that there was nothing left to hold on with to transition."

Her form flickered.

He growled. "Quit leaving!" he shouted in frustration.

"Quit yelling at me!" she shouted back, frowning. But she didn't fade this time.

He stood and walked carefully around the candles to sit next to her. Their bodies didn't touch, though he was sorely tempted to wipe some of the blood from her face.

The sight of it reminded him too much of the way she looked when he had lifted her into his arms, dead, that night.

"Would you have transitioned if you'd woken up?"

She shrugged. "It doesn't really matter now, does it?"

"I guess not."

They sat in silence for a few moments, the sound of Zora's chanting washing over them gently, as if from a great distance.

"You didn't forget me." Her voice was nearly a whisper. She stared into the fire in the bowl before them.

"No, I didn't."

She almost smiled, her gaze still fixed forward.

After a beat, she breathed deeply. "It's working, the bond feels stronger."

Zora's chanting began to fade around them.

Bonnie shook her head like she was waking from a dream. "It's not enough. You need to bring me back. Damon, you're the only one I can count on." Her words came rapidly, suddenly frantic.

"What's wrong?" He felt a haze beginning to lift. Someone was calling his name.

He saw her lips soundlessly form the word "Klaus," and when he blinked he was back on the other side of the candles with Zora's hand on his arm. He looked up, but Bonnie was gone.

Zora gave him a weak smile. "It's done."

He placed his hand over hers and her eyebrows rose questioningly. "Thank you."

The witch was clearly surprised but said nothing, giving him a slight nod.

Soon, she stood on her porch and watched the vampire walking towards his car. "Drive carefully," she sent after him.

He turned back to her with the first smirk she'd seen from him that day. "I'm a vampire, silver fox. Being reckless is one of the many perks."

"And don't I know it," she muttered in return, but she smiled, barely. She shut the door.

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**A/N: We almost made it a whole week this time! Almost. Thanks to all of you guys who sent messages of support over my laptop issues! Luckily I only have to use it while traveling, so it's now getting a chance to completely dry out and hopefully it will magically work again next time. A girl can dream? (:**

**For the guest reviews! Kaykay: **Thank you! So glad you like it so far. I hope you enjoyed the update (:,** Guest: **Thank you! :D

**I hope you guys liked Zora. I've never introduced an OC before, so I'm a teensy bit terrified. I actually started writing this a long time ago, and it's a total coincidence that she has the same name as Bonnie/Damon's daughter in godiva-duchess' fantastic tumblr gifset AU series, We Could Have Had It All. You should definitely check that out if you haven't, feels overload!**

**So what did you think of Bonnie and Damon getting to actually converse? Remember that preemptive disclaimer from way back in chapter 2 about AU and time passing and "something like grief" and things? Totally still stands! :D I hope nothing was too jarringly OOC, though.**

**Okay, I'm rambling now. I've been doing that a lot lately. Please R&R, you guys are the absolute best and I love yooooou!**


	6. 06 The Dead Bury the Dead

_****__**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**_

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Cinematic Orchestra – Arrival of the Birds & Transformation, Florence + the Machine - Cosmic Love**_

* * *

_Rays of light bounced in every direction, reflected off of the shiny mylar balloons that were gathered into tremulous, floating clusters. The wailing strains of Johnny B. Goode filtered through the crowded high school gym._

_He saw her from across the room, lost in the movement of her own body as she danced in the center of a horde of friends. Something tightened in his chest to see her carefree smile._

_Gone, however, was the pretty strapless floral number she had worn the last time they'd attended this dance. Instead, her gown billowed and twirled around her frame as she twisted along with the music._

_Caroline leaned towards her, grabbing her arm and shouting words into her ear to overcome the noise surrounding them. They stepped away together, heading for one of the nearby tables to catch their breath and drink punch._

_He found he had an actual bounce in his step as he made his way towards them. She had her back to him and so could not see him approach, but he felt the smug smile cross his face anyway._

_"Hey, Bonnieee," he crooned, getting her attention. "You wanna dance?"_

_Her face was a mask of sheer revulsion. "I'm outta here."_

_He blocked her exit with his body, smiling at her sincerely. "Please give me another chance."_

_She rolled her eyes and moved neatly around him, Caroline already two steps ahead and throwing him an incredulous parting stare._

_"Seriously, Bonnie, wait. Stay with me for a sec." He reached out and grabbed the girl's wrist, spinning her back to face him._

_When she turned, there was blood cascading down from her hairline. Some of it rolled down the bridge of her nose and streaked down her cheeks like startling crimson tears._

_"Bonnie - " he choked out._

_"Don't forget, Damon."_

**He flew out of bed, woken** by the sound of banging on the door as the morning sun had barely begun to seep into the dark bedroom.

"Where the hell have you been?" Alaric stood on his doorstep at 8am.

"Oh hey, Dad. Sorry I forgot all about that pesky curfew."

Alaric frowned. "Stefan called, he's worried about you. I've been driving here and banging on your door for like two days now."

"I don't need a babysitter. And I definitely don't need a drunk babysitter. Are you sure you should be driving by anywhere?"

The man standing on his front stoop making demands before the sun had even fully risen had the audacity to roll his eyes. "You think ghost Bonnie is after you."

"Can't tell that boy anything," Damon grumbled, turning on his heel and walking back into the house. He left the door open and Alaric followed, closing it behind him.

"If it's gotten so bad that you're hallucinating, maybe you should talk about it or something." The history teacher's voice was strained.

Damon grimaced. "I know what I've seen. It's her." He contemplated pouring himself a glass of bourbon, but instead fell back onto the sofa. "So thanks but no thanks, Dr. Phil."

"So you really think the ghost of Bonnie Bennett is hanging around? And that she's picked you of all people to haunt?" He stopped and considered. "I guess that's not that weird, if I was going to torment somebody eternally it would probably be you too."

Damon scowled. "Always with the sweet sentiments. She's real, it's her. And she's not out to get me, she needs my help."

Alaric said nothing, but didn't look in any way convinced either. If anything, the latest development made him even less confident in his friend's mental faculties.

"Fine, watch. Just don't be mad when I say I told you so." The vampire took a superfluous breath and focused on recreating that desperate feeling that had filled him the last time he'd accidentally summoned Bonnie to him. He imagined her face, her voice drifting through his house, that scent that no one had but her.

After a few moments of nothing happening, he noticed Alaric looking at him sadly. Damon cringed. "Get out."

"Come on, Damon. You can talk about this."

"I said, get out." He didn't raise his voice, but his tone left no room for doubt that the vampire was on the verge of doing something they'd both regret. Alaric stood and made his way back out the front door.

"You're a terrible therapist, by the way!" Damon shouted after him. Was it really that hard to believe that Bonnie might choose him to ask for help?

The vampire felt his anger like a thundercloud constricting around him, and then there she was, staring at him from across the room.

He threw up his hands. "Of course you'd show up right after he left."

She shook her head. "I can only push so hard on the door." She took a step towards him. "You need to work faster, I have to get back to Mystic Falls."

"So how do we do it?"

"I hid the grimoire with the resurrection spell in the Fell Crypt, before… everything." He frowned when she stumbled over the latter part of the statement.

"So you just have little witch cookbooks hidden all around town?"

She huffed impatiently, but seized the subject change. "Well, yeah. They're irreplaceable, it made good sense to be careful."

"You're such a Bennett witch," he snickered.

Her fists clenched at her sides, she stared at him warily. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It's not."

After a beat, he thought he saw the briefest flicker of a smile cross her lips.

"Wait, you said it's because of Klaus. How is he still a threat? I distinctly remember us killing that guy, it was kind of a big deal."

She made a face. "You can't outright kill an Original hybrid, not with natural magic. The spell I used banished and then bound his spirit to his corpse. And that was the spell that Jonas Martin gave me. The Jonas Martin that was working for Elijah..."

Damon filled in the final blank. "The Elijah who rammed his fist into your chest and then whisked Klaus' body away before anybody could blink."

She winced as her hand lifted absentmindedly to brush against her tattered blouse, nodding.

"I found out from the witches over here that the key to unbinding and restoring Klaus' spirit is a spell. Elijah didn't have it the last time I was watching him, but he's going to figure it out soon enough."

Damon's mouth twisted in derision. Why was it that the ones who went on and on about honor were always the most evil bastards at the end of the day?

Bonnie continued, "If I can get back and find Klaus' body, I can extend the spell so it isn't possible to restore his spirit anymore, spell or not. It has to be me, I'm the one who bound him."

Her fingers continued toying with the frayed edges of her blouse as she spoke, and Damon reached up to stop her. As his hand passed through hers, all he felt was a tingly chill. He dropped his arm as she dropped hers.

"Obviously," he said flatly. "Typical unnecessarily complicated witch logic."

She smiled.

He was surprised to see it. "Where'd that endearingly surly attitude go?"

Her smile faded, and she paused. "When you're a witch newly arrived on the Other Side, there isn't much that you know how to do... I've had a lot of time to watch this side," she finally admitted.

"Of all the people in the world, you chose me to watch?" He leered and continued, "Yeah, you did. I get it."

"And let me tell you how shocked I was to discover that you're still a total ass."

"There's the attitude," he crowed triumphantly.

She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling again. "Anyway, I've been watching other people too. Like Elijah, remember."

"There's no way that uptight dandy vamp is more entertaining than me," Damon scoffed. "And have you been playing bubble bath footsie with him?"

Bonnie shook her head, biting back a laugh. "You know, the first time I made contact with you was a complete accident. I think the only reason it worked was that you'd gone back to the quarry where my magic lingered after I died. I was just as surprised as you were when you heard me."

He smirked, remembering what she had said.

"You're the only one I had a blood bond with, so I think that's why you're the only one I've been able to reach out to," she explained.

"Speaking of that, we've been talking for a while this time, and you're still here."

She nodded, agreeing. "Aunt Zora's spell worked. It's still taking a lot of energy to affect this side, but it's not as bad now."

She began detailing Elijah's plans and how near the Original had come to reviving his brother, and Damon thought to himself that it was just like falling back into the way they were before, always plotting a master plan.

"He needs this amulet that belonged to the witch who originally bound Klaus' werewolf side, their mother. Which is a dead end for him right now because it was passed down to his sister Rebekah, and Klaus is the only one who knew what happened to her."

"Great. So we just have to resurrect a dead witch and locate the corpse of a sorta-dead Original hybrid. Meanwhile, we'll find an unfindable Original vampire chick, pilfer her jewelry, and make sure Elijah doesn't get his grabby little well-manicured fingers on it. No problem."

Another smile tugged at Bonnie's lips.

Damon watched her, his eyes narrowing. "You know something. What do you know?"

"The witches talk, especially when it comes to something as powerful as a thousand year old talisman." She paused. "Rebekah doesn't have it anymore."

Damon raised an eyebrow.

"It's currently dangling around the neck of one Elena Gilbert."

The vampire was stunned. "Come again?"

Bonnie shrugged. "I don't know, but it's the necklace Stefan filled with vervain and gave to her."

"Alright then, I guess. We should get that first, in case he's figured it out by now. Let's go."

"I'll meet you there, all this manifesting is draining."

He nodded, but she was already gone. "You need to stop doing that, Judgy."

**He slipped his sunglasses on** as the midday sun shone bright across the windshield. The winter sun was less harsh than in warmer months, but his vampire eyes were still sensitive to it.

He flexed his fingers while gripping the steering wheel and came to the realization that he was a little drained too. He wondered if that was a consequence of the blood bond.

This wasn't his first blood bond, though his experience was fairly limited. Limited to the bedroom, to be clear. And he'd never bonded with a witch before, let alone a witch who was now dead. He assumed that Bonnie's witchiness was the factor that allowed the bond to live on for so long, unlike the fleeting connections of his past. Needless to say, he was charting entirely new territory in more ways than one.

Yet despite his tiredness, he found that he felt like himself again, maybe for the first time since that fateful night at the quarry.

Strange that feeding and carousing weren't what made him feel like himself anymore, but rather just the simple act (or not so simple, as the case may be) of talking to Bonnie.

He supposed it made sense in a way. Her shuffling off the mortal coil was what had thrown him off kilter in the first place. Having her in his life again, in spite of the unorthodox circumstances, would be the only thing to mend that void so neatly.

And when he brought her back, they'd both be at full form again. The thought had him smirking before he even realized it.

**When he reached the small bungalow** in Greenville, he sat in the car for a moment.

"Alright Witchy, we're here. Where are you?"

He was answered by silence.

"Whatever." He climbed out of the car and made his way towards the house.

A reluctant Jeremy invited him inside, clearly uncomfortable to be in the presence of the Salvatore brother he didn't trust. Once Damon was joined in the living room by Stefan and Elena, the boy made himself scarce, muttering about having other things to do.

Stefan was happy to see his brother in North Carolina. When he gave Damon a wide smile, the older brother wondered if the sullen lines that usually furrowed into his brow weren't somehow threatened by the action.

"I'm glad you changed your mind," Stefan began. Behind him, Elena was all smiles as well. "A new context will be good for you."

"We've all been worried about you," Elena said.

Damon cringed internally (and externally). "Well, as much as I'd _love_ to stay and work out some kind of brother-wives situation with you two in Bumfuck, North Carolina, that's not why I'm here."

Stefan and Elena looked at each other, frowning.

His patience was dwindling from the moment he had stepped through the front door, and he didn't want to deal with any more patronizing or concerned shared glances, so he decided not to fill them in on his Haley Joel Osment adventures with Bonnie.

"I need Elena's necklace."

The girl in question raised her hand to clutch the pendant. "W-why?"

"Because it matches my earrings," he drawled. "Does it matter?"

Damon stepped towards her, his hand held out, but Stefan moved between them. The older brother huffed in annoyance.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but snapped it shut as a low, rasping whisper echoed in his ear.

"He's here. _GET HER OUT!_"

Damon corralled Stefan and Elena towards the back door, murmuring quietly to Stefan. "There's no time, you need to get Elena out of here right now."

The younger brother sensed the urgency of his tone and grabbed Elena, who was still clutching her necklace in confusion. They sped through the back door, leaving Damon in the house alone.

Almost as soon as the pair disappeared, the front door blew open to reveal Elijah. He gripped Jeremy in front of him, a wooden stake pressed into the side of the boy's neck.

"So kind of you to ask me in to your lovely home," the Original deadpanned.

Elijah's lips spread into a wan smile as the pair entered, his cool gaze falling on Damon, who stood alone in the living room. One of the dining room chairs lay in shambles at the younger vampire's feet, and he was holding its splintered leg.

Elijah released Jeremy, and the teen backed away to the far end of the room, nearly tripping on the stairs. He smoothly tossed a heavy crested ring towards him, and it hit the wooden floor at the boy's feet with a jarring clatter. The vampire turned to face Damon, whose face was warped with disdain.

"Hello, Damon."

"Hello, traitor."

Elijah tsked disapprovingly. "Name-calling is so juvenile, is it not?" he chided. "You of all people would understand a man taking extreme measures to protect his loved ones. I recall a certain forced blood feeding fiasco."

"You know, you're really just kind of a sniveling prick underneath all those pretty manners," Damon sneered.

Elijah smiled slightly, bending down to move a glass that rested on the coffee table onto a coaster. "It's been too long since I had the pleasure of a visit with the fair Elena, might she be in?"

Damon snapped with mock disappointment. "Just missed her."

"What a shame. Perhaps I'll just wait until she returns." He took a seat in one of the armchairs, and he politely motioned for Damon to do the same.

"I'd rather not take tea and chat with a turncoat, if it's all the same to you."

Elijah stared at him, his mouth setting tensely as his patience clearly wore thin. "This little tantrum will be over soon, I hope. We should sit and talk like civilized monsters."

Damon's anger swelled. "There's nothing civilized about what you did that night," he spat out.

The Original's jaw clicked. He tilted his head to scrutinize his adversary, putting the pieces together. "So this is about the witch then."

"More than you even know." Damon rushed at him with the chair leg.

Elijah was on his feet and crouched defensively before Damon reached him.

They fought, each striking heavy blows. The chair leg rattled against the floor as Damon lost his grip on it when Elijah threw him across the room. As the younger vampire climbed painfully to his feet, he suddenly found himself against the wall, Elijah's fingers tightening around his throat.

Elijah's stake pressed hard and slow against his chest. He used his hands to slow its progress, but the Original vampire was too strong. The sharp wood broke through the fabric and skin, and Damon roared in pain as he felt his ribs crack and shift.

The Original's eyes were feral, staring straight into his own as he struggled.

But then the grip on his neck loosened, as they both noticed a heavy mist had filled every inch of the room.

Elijah took a step back, looking disoriented and wheezing strangely. He waved his hands in an attempt to disperse the thick vapor, but it kept closing back in on him.

With no hesitation, Damon spun the stake around and plunged it through Elijah's chest, watching with grim satisfaction as grey veins formed a veil over the vampire's features.

The mist vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

"What... the fuck?" a dumbfounded Jeremy spoke, ducked behind the banister of the staircase.

"Ghost witchy juju," Damon muttered as he grabbed his phone and dialed Stefan. "Good news, baby bro. You get to move again. New context and all that."

**With the proof of the** incapacitated vampire corpse in their living room and Jeremy's stunned confirmation of the course of events, Stefan and Elena were forced to accept that there was more going on than Damon's delusions.

"Is it really her?" Tears shimmered in the eyes of the doppelganger. Her brother behind her was in a similar state.

"_Yes_." Damon was still peeved that they hadn't believed him.

They wanted all the details then. "What does Elijah even want?" Stefan asked.

"Long story short, Elijah's found a way to bring back Klaus."

Stefan's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline, and Elena drew her hand to cover her mouth, frowning.

"To stop it, I need the necklace." He stared at Elena.

"You don't have to be so secretive, Damon. We could help you," Stefan hedged.

"Well tough luck, the fewer people involved, the better," Damon retorted. "Right now you can help me by giving me that necklace, moving into a new house that the Original Douchebag hasn't been invited into, and letting me take care of things without your meddling for once."

"I don't know. Elijah wouldn't necessarily leave Elena alone just because she doesn't have the necklace anymore." Stefan frowned, the familiar furrows creased into his forehead.

Elena shifted her weight from one leg to the other. "I'm not defending him, but I know Elijah. He's not going to come after us if we don't have anything he wants."

Damon wondered what kind of twisted empathy allowed the girl to make such predictions about the man who killed her best friend, but at the same time he knew they were both right to believe it.

Elena slipped the necklace off over her head, allowing the pendant to dangle from her clenched hand as she stepped towards the elder Salvatore. She held it out to him, and he clasped the locket in his palm.

As it touched his skin, Damon's eyes widened. He could feel the magic coursing through it, extremely powerful magic. It hadn't felt like this before.

He glanced at his brother. "How could you give something like this away, can't you feel the energy in it?"

"What are you talking about?" Stefan asked.

Damon peered at the necklace curiously, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

Stefan started to speak again, but his brother gave him a pointed look before grabbing Elijah's body and zooming out the broken front door, not waiting to hear what he had to say.

Stefan sighed.

* * *

**A/N: I planned to post this yesterday because it was my birthday, and then I could tell you it was my birthday and if you hated the chapter you couldn't be TOO mean in the comments, but then I got all busy and now the opportunity has passed. So I am prepared for all of your vitriol! Just kidding, you guys are so nice to me, way nicer than I deserve, LOL. Thank you so much for reading and for all of your amazing reviews/alerts/favorites!**

**For the guest reviewers! Guest1: **Thank you! :D,** Guest2: **Creepy is totally a good thing to hear when you're writing a story about ghost witches, LOL. Thank you! Hope you liked the new chapter!

**I hope you guys liked this chapter, there was a bit more action and a bit more information on what's really going on with Bonnie. The picture's still not 100%, but it'll get there in time :D (Hopefully.)**

**I've been getting a lot of questions about the dream scenes, and I want to leave stuff up to your interpretation at this point, but when this is all wrapped up I may post something after the epilogue to explain what I personally feel their purpose/significance is, because I do have something in mind, I promise! (:**

**A HUGE shoutout to TalulaJones who is basically my fic-writer idol! Her writing is intensely beautiful and insightful and moving. It has so much depth, she's really such a gem for our Bamon family. She's working on a story called the Curious Case of Bonnie Bennett right now, and if you're not following along then you are truly missing out! Get over there! :D**

**Love you guuuuys!**


	7. 07 In the Darkness With You

_****__****__**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**_

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Sarah McLachlan – Full of Grace, Sarah McLachlan - Possession**_

* * *

**The sun had begun to dip** deep into the horizon, shrouded once more by dreary grey clouds as he passed the Virginia state line. Its faint glow hit his eyes, somehow sneaking between the lowered visor and the frame of the car.

Damon was driving home. He had dumped Elijah's corpse unceremoniously in a ditch on the side of the road about 20 miles outside of Greenville. A politely worded note tucked into the Original's jacket pocket would inform him that the amulet was with Damon now, and if he wanted it he could kindly go fuck himself. Warmest regards, Damon Salvatore.

He smirked. He wished he could see Elijah's face when the Original eventually woke.

His face when Bonnie did her ghost juju was pretty good too, though. He remembered how the mist was suddenly there, everywhere all at once.

Motion in the corner of his eye drew his attention to her, sitting in the passenger seat. She wasn't wearing the tattered blouse or covered in blood anymore. In fact, she was wearing an off-white gown.

His mind flew to the visions of her in his dreams, and he felt an unnecessary breath catch in his throat. But as he took a closer look, he realized it wasn't exactly the same. This one had beading across the neckline and thin spaghetti straps.

"New duds, huh?" he asked nonchalantly.

She nodded. "I'm picking up some new tricks on the Other Side. I can pretty much make you see me wearing whatever I want you to see."

He glanced at her meaningfully, his lip curling into a smirk once more.

She glared back at him, flustered. "That is _not_ what I meant, you perv."

His smugness lingered before fading away. "Thank you for your help back there, Judgy."

"Eyes on the road, Salvatore." When his gaze shifted forward again, she quietly said, "You're welcome."

He smiled. "So what do we do with this amulet now?"

"I can destroy it with a spell once I'm back, but for now you need to hide it somewhere safe, somewhere warded, where Elijah won't find it."

"I have places like that."

"You're Damon Salvatore, of course you do."

They sat quietly for a bit after that. The sun was completely hidden beneath the distant horizon then, and he was lulled by the swaying, repetitive motion of the glow that filtered into the car from the streetlights that they passed.

She broke the silence finally. "Look, I need to thank you too. Thank you for protecting Jeremy."

He hemmed internally. Frankly, he'd forgotten that the miserable teenager was even there at the time. He decided to just nod. "Have you been spying on Boy Wonder too then, or been too busy playing voyeur with me?"

She rolled her eyes. She turned to gaze out the window as she replied, "I've watched him some. It took time, but he's moving on. He has a girlfriend and everything."

"You want me to beat him up?" Damon asked, only somewhat joking.

She laughed, and he liked the way it sounded, ethereal and echoing in his car. "Don't you dare." She threw him a warning glance. She soon grew still, however. "It's the way things are supposed to be. He's following the natural order, I wouldn't want him to mourn forever."

She reached out and her fingers grazed his hand on the gear shift. He couldn't feel her touch, but a chill swept over his skin. "It looks like you and I are the only two not following the natural order this time. We can't afford to," she continued wistfully.

He sneered. "Welcome to the last 150 years of my life." But this time was different, he knew. For the first time, someone was choosing to defy that natural order right alongside him.

She pulled her hand back. "I'll deny this if you ever bring it up again," she began, and he glanced at her with interest. "I'm glad I don't have to do this alone… Sometimes it seems like everyone could just forget I even existed."

He was silent at that, uncertain how to respond. Finally, he said, "It's some kind of ironic that the only person you'd be able to reach out to is the one you loathed the most."

"Loathe is such a _strong_ word," she replied, smiling. "I don't loathe you."

Damon persisted. "Everything I am is everything you hate."

Her eyes were soft as she spoke. "If I've learned anything through all that's happened, it's that it doesn't matter so much what you are, what counts is what you do."

He stared out at the road as a hush fell over the car. Soon enough, when he turned to look at her again, she was gone.

**When he got home after** depositing the amulet in its safekeeping spot, Alaric was standing on his doorstep.

"Seriously?" the vampire sighed.

The vampire hunter shrugged. They went inside.

"Stefan told me what he knows about everything that's going on. Now give me the full story."

Damon puttered behind the bar, eyeing his friend unhappily. "I very clearly remember the last time I tried to tell you the full story. I'm not exactly known for my candid heart to hearts, you know."

Alaric stared in disbelief. "I _know_ you're not looking for an apology. Maybe you want to hug and braid each other's hair too while we're at it."

Damon pursed his lips before sneering. "Whatever." He finished pouring his drink and repeated the motion for Alaric. He walked to the sofa, handing the other man the extra tumbler as he sat.

With a sigh, he began. He told his friend everything, and this time Alaric offered no pitying glances. He didn't laugh either. Instead, at the end, he considered. "It's still pretty weird, but it's not like we don't live in a world where you can hang out with the vampire who killed your ex-wife. Weirder things have happened."

Damon swirled the ice in his empty glass, contemplating heading back to the bar.

"Still, her though? Isn't it weird that the one who'd haunt you would be _her_?" Suddenly Alaric's sleeve was on fire. He frantically patted it out, but the flames were gone before he could even notice that the fabric wasn't singed.

Damon snickered.

"Bonnie?" the history teacher asked.

The vampire nodded. "Bonnie."

"Huh." Alaric took a large gulp of his scotch.

_**One of the fluorescent lamps**__ blown out by her hopeless display of power continued to buzz angrily. Sparks fell to the ground, dancing over the loose paper and litter now strewn wildly around the high school cafeteria._

_In the middle of it all, he saw her lying motionless on the floor, and he knew she wasn't dead._

_He knelt beside her and closed her eyes with a gentle brush of his hand. He wished that that had been the last time he'd had to do that._

_When he lifted her into his arms, he noticed how her body curled into his seamlessly, her curves soft against him. He allowed his fingers to trail along her side soothingly, though he knew she couldn't feel it._

_He was carrying her towards his car when she woke with a harsh gasp. Her pulse raced, and he felt her heart thudding as if it were in his own chest. _

_A lump in his throat ached uncomfortably as another wish washed over him. If only she'd done that the night of the sacrifice._

_"Did it work?" Her voice was ragged and groggy, her eyes barely willing to stay open._

_He pulled her closer, leaning his head down to press his lips against her temple. He heard her give a soft sigh, and her heartbeat calmed. _

**As Damon grasped the sculpted** cover of Honoria Fell's sarcophagus, he gave it a sharp tug and watched it fall heavily to the floor. Bonnie's directions had been clear, but she hadn't told him that he'd be getting such a workout in the quest to obtain the hidden grimoire containing the resurrection spell.

He wondered how Bonnie had managed the feat herself, when she hid the spellbook in the first place. Then he realized, magic obviously.

Still, when he imagined Bonnie coming to the Fell family crypt alone, he couldn't help but be a little impressed. The place was dank and chaotic with debris and the remains of whatever creatures that were feasted on by the owls that nested in the eaves. He wouldn't come here of his own volition, and he was a quintessential creature of the night.

Inside the sarcophagus were, oddly, roughshod granite stairs. The steps led down into darkness, and when he followed them he found himself in catacombs beneath the tomb. He made his way to the far end, his vampire sight barely able to distinguish a chamber of some sort there.

A cool mist spread before him. It swelled and stretched into the cobwebbed corners of the dark space. He wasn't surprised when Bonnie appeared before him.

"Points for extra creepiness." His mouth twisted into a smirk.

She turned from him, looking for the spot where she had concealed the grimoire. "Took you long enough, I started to think you wouldn't make it."

He scoffed. "Have a little faith, Witchy. It's not exactly the easiest place to get to. One of your ghost witchy pals ought to work some juju and zip it right out to us. Or better yet, just cast the damn spell themselves."

"They won't help me anymore. Anyway, that's not how it works."

"Wait, why won't they help you?"

She shrugged.

He watched her as she stopped before a portion of the wall, tilting his head curiously at her vaguely luminous form in the darkness.

She seemed to glide around the room, peering into crannies hidden in the cobblestone walls. "You know Honoria Fell was a witch? She was a guardian to Mystic Falls, even after she died."

She pointed to a particular stone, and when he nudged it he found that it was loose. With a tug, it came tumbling free. Behind it, a small pocket of darkness housed one rather ancient-looking tome. He pulled it out, blowing a thin layer of dust off the cover.

"Yeah, I was alive back then, remember?"

She frowned. Apparently she hadn't remembered.

He tucked the book into a pocket in the lining of his leather jacket. "She was kind of a stuck up bitch, actually."

Bonnie's mouth fell slightly open as she gave him an incredulous glare.

"What? Doesn't mean what you said isn't true too."

The ethereal witch let out a sigh that seemed to echo through the catacombs like a chill breeze. Damon shivered in spite of himself.

Together, they climbed back out into the daylight.

_**Annoyance writhed in his gut.**__ He was stuck outside the derelict witch house, the spirits within intent on turning him into vampire barbecue. Jeremy and Bonnie were inside, and here he was, the outcast._

_A cold wind rushed through the branches of the ancient trees surrounding him, their limbs bowing in towards the old house protectively. The country manor seemed to fade into the untamed wilderness around it, moss and water damage lending the crumbling facade a mottled appearance._

_He kicked at the dirt under his feet. If no one else of the murdered witches, Emily really ought to have been more grateful. He'd held up his end of that protect-the-bloodline bargain for a steady century and a half, at least._

_His thoughts were interrupted by the violent slamming of the front door, but he barely noticed it. Instead, his ears were attuned to the bloodcurdling screams of the girl now trapped inside._

_"Bonnie!"_

_It seemed as if the color of the world around him drained away as his body grew tense with fear. His boot crashed down onto the door again and again, but somehow it was sturdier than it should have been. Or he was weaker than he should have been._

_He threw his shoulder against it instead, but still the door stood firm._

_Finally, he shattered one of the front windows and climbed into the dilapidated study. He didn't notice as the jagged shards of glass scraped and sliced his skin._

_Her screaming seemed to come from upstairs, and he immediately moved to race up the rickety staircase. His legs felt weighted down, and his every motion was painfully slow. Her screams grew more frantic, and the sound made something tighten painfully in his chest._

_He found her in one of the abandoned bedrooms, sitting serenely atop a tattered mattress. Her eyes were closed, and she sat with her legs crossed as if she were meditating. She was radiant, suffused with so much power, and did not appear to be in any distress._

_He went to her, kneeling beside her to see if she was alright. Her eyes opened slowly, and he could have sworn they weren't usually so bright. She smiled, her features tranquil despite the fact that her attention was rapt upon him._

_Her legs uncrossed to splay over the floor on either side of his body. She brought her hand up to cup his cheek, her thumb brushing his bottom lip. _

_He did his best to ignore the tightness her actions were creating in his pants as she bent towards him, her full lips slightly parted. He wondered how soft they would feel against his own. They looked so soft. The familiar scent of citrus, honey, and sage enveloped him entirely._

_"Where's Jeremy?" he asked, unconsciously leaning into her touch as her fingers caressed his face._

_She stared at his mouth, her eyes entranced and wide with some kind of wonder. "Who?"_

_"Kinda tall, ugly mug. You know, the littlest Gil -"_

_He was stopped short by her hand sliding down to grip his collar. She pulled him up to her, as her lips crashed against his._

_They were softer than he had expected._

_She kissed him like a woman consumed, as if nothing else could ever matter. His hands tangled in her hair, and her parted lips were an invitation that he gladly and greedily accepted._

_He moved up onto the mattress with her, pushing her down without breaking the kiss. Her back hit the soft padding as he kept himself braced, hovering over her. His steadying knee parted her thighs, and the intoxicating scent of her arousal drifted to greet his vampire senses. He felt her ankle sliding against his leg as his tongue explored her mouth._

_He vaguely realized that the air itself was aglow. Tiny orbs of light swayed to and fro above them, and he felt an exhilarating prickle dance over his skin, evidence of the vast amount of energy pulsing all around._

_A soft moan escaped her mouth to hum against his lips. He let her catch her breath, trailing kisses along her jaw and down her neck. Nimble fingers pushed one strap of her gown over her shoulder, his lips and tongue following the path of the fabric. _

_Her back arched and her hands dragged through his hair as he left hot, open-mouthed kisses along the exposed tops of her breasts. His fingers trapped the hard nubs of her nipples through the thin material, and he growled hungrily to hear her throaty gasp as he gave one a light, twisting tug._

_The straining bulge in his jeans found friction against her thigh as she wrapped her legs tight around him._

**Damon woke with a groan** as his phone rang. He had fallen asleep in the armchair in the library again.

He shifted uncomfortably. He was going to kill whoever had chosen that opportune moment to call. He opened his phone and snapped, "What the hell do you want?"

Zora's heavy drawl echoed on the other end of the line. "Hello to you too, honey. I got your message.

He sighed, having forgotten he had even called her. "And?"

"It's dangerous, the kind of magic you're asking for. I've never heard of a resurrection spell that wasn't dark, that didn't require some kind of life-for-a-life balance."

"So will you do it?"

"You know, Bonnie's father swore that he wanted to keep her from the life. We all let him. Every parent has the right to keep their children out of harm's way however they can. We were just following his wishes."

Everyone but Sheila, he thought. She was the only one who was close enough to see that there was no way of keeping the young witch from her abilities, not in Mystic Falls.

She continued ruefully, "If we'd known…"

"That's not really an answer, Zora."

"It is, if you'd listened to it the right way. Send me the list of ingredients, I'll get things ready."

He walked over to the table where the open grimoire lay. Snapping a photo of the page containing the spell, he sent it to the witch.

The line was quiet as she read the spell, and he considered that everything was actually going according to plan for once. They had the amulet, and everything was on track for getting Bonnie back up and running.

The silence on the other end had stretched on for too long, he realized. It was only one page, after all.

"Foxy?"

"You've got a lot of nerve." Her voice took on a sharp edge, trembling with anger.

"… Come again?"

"I should have known. Any good witch will tell you, you'll never meet a vampire who isn't a selfish bastard right down to their miserable core, and if any convince you otherwise, you'll be the fool in the end."

"What are you talking about?" he growled.

"This spell, it's ugly. Hideous, hurtful magic. You'll bring her back but you're willing to untether her soul."

He frowned. "What does that mean?"

She was silent for a moment on the other end. "She'll be back, but when she dies again, her spirit won't find its way to the Other Side. It will be well and truly destroyed."

Damon's grip grew tight on the phone, the screen threatening to crack.

"How can you be so selfish?" the witch fumed.

"Well, now we know why the witches on the Other Side weren't willing to help her," he said through gritted teeth. "I didn't know, Zora. I wouldn't… I won't let her do that."

She sighed.

After he ended the call, he sat in the armchair with his head in his hands, lost in his thoughts. Bonnie's determination at once awed and infuriated him. Wouldn't the girl ever get tired of sacrificing herself?

**He couldn't forget the resigned disappointment furrowing in her brow as she realized that Elijah was betraying them, followed in the blink of an eye by a cold, inhuman fury that shrouded her whole form as she refocused her energy on the hybrid.**

**The next time Bonnie appeared**, Damon was washing his hands in the men's restroom of the Grill. He looked up and saw her luminous eyes staring back at him in the mirror, as she stood silently behind him.

When he turned from her wordlessly to dry his hands instead of making a snarky comment about the setting and her timing, she was confused.

"What's with you?"

"The plan's off. As long as Elijah doesn't have the talisman, we have time to work on another way to get you back topside."

He watched in the mirror as her eyes settled once again on his reflection, a cool rage building behind their murky green hue. "What?"

"Zora told me what the spell will do to you. You're crazy if you think that's going to fly."

"There is no other way that isn't dark magic, _Damon_."

"I don't know how you witches decide on your definitions, but untethering your soul sounds pretty dark to me, _Bonnie._"

A rough crack split the mirror he was facing. "If it's in my power to right these wrongs, it will be _my_ decision, not yours. And my decision is made."

He turned to face her, his gaze firm. "Made decision or not, I'm the one on this side. And I say no." He didn't falter, despite the wrath that seemed to radiate off of her.

All at once, every mirror in the room shattered completely, the sharp shards of glass exploding into the empty air. He fell to his knees, shielding his face with his arms. The lights in the entire establishment shorted out, plunging the windowless restroom into darkness.

All Damon saw was black.

When the lights came back up, Bonnie's form was nowhere to be seen. He climbed to his feet and dusted himself off.

He took a deep breath. He glanced at himself in the fractured remains of one of the mirrors, as his pale blue eyes glinted green.

He pulled the door open and walked through it, shards of glass crunching under his boots.

* * *

**A/N: DUN DUN DUN! Oh, Bonnie.**

**Super, super, super nervous about this one. First of all, I've never written smut before. D: Hope it wasn't too painful. Also, I know Bamon conflict isn't fun for many readers, but I'm hoping that the payoff will be worth it in the end! (:**

**Thanks so much to all of you guys for your awesome birthday wishes and your amazing reviews and sweet PMs and your favorites and follows and tumblr notes and asldknawelkrjwer! It's just totally overwhelming, how great you guys are! **

**For the guest reviewers! Guest1: **Thank you so much! :D,** Guest2: **Thank you for the birthday wishes, and for your kind words about the story! I'm so thrilled you're enjoying it so far :D I definitely know where you're coming from re: Elena. It's a shame how destroyed her character has been on the show... hard to believe that she used to be the character most of us related to the most in season 1! Other than Bonnie, of course (: Hope you liked the new chapter!

**I hope that you enjoyed this chapter. I had a ton of fun writing it and the upcoming chapter in particular, to be honest, and not just because I get to sneak in Supernatural allusions. Though lbr, that's pretty fun.**

**Next chapter we will FINALLY get some more Bonnie POV. I actually am really loving writing this version of Damon's POV because it's fun, but it's been strange to write a Bamon fic with so little of Bonnie's perspective. That happened mostly because I didn't want to get too far into the mechanics of the Other Side because I will totally obsess and get bogged down by those mechanics and the story will crawl and suffer and you'll all hate me. Soooo, maybe we won't do that. But next chapter, definitely more Bonnie. :D**

**Please R&R, love you guys!**


	8. 08 Falling From Your Grace

**_Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer._**

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Sarah McLachlan – Do What You Have to Do, Poe – Spanish Doll**_

* * *

**Bonnie Bennett was no longer** herself.

Yet at the same time, she was never more resolutely true to the ideals that she valued.

A short two years ago, Bonnie was a very different person. A person wrapped in light, a person who was flippant and fun. A person who didn't realize just how much she had to lose.

Now she knew it quite well. She had lost it all.

First she lost her normalcy, when she learned that sometimes nightmares weren't just nightmares. She discovered in the most violent way possible that vampires were real, the message delivered by furious teeth sinking into her throat. And as her powers began to develop, she realized that she would never be the girl she thought she was, never live the life she thought she would live.

Then she lost her shelter, when her Grams slipped away without so much as a faintly breathed goodbye. Though the young witch hadn't realized it until those last few months they had together, she was the only person whose foremost priority in the world was Bonnie.

Sheila was the steady quiet tide pulling the girl back to shore every time she felt she'd drown in the overwhelming truth of a world that was darker and more dangerous than she'd ever known. Bonnie had thought at the time that that would be her rock bottom. She'd been wrong.

Somewhere along the way, she lost herself entirely. Swallowed by her mission, the value she placed on her own life withered away, and no one thought to question that. The laughing, cheerful girl she used to be disappeared behind a façade of nonchalance and tenacious ferocity.

Finally, her losses led to their inevitable conclusion. She lost her life itself. Stripped of nearly everything she once held to be real, the only certainty left for her was the conviction that she would do what needed to be done. As her lifeless body hit the cold, rocky ground that night in a mess of flesh and blood and magic, she paid what most would think to be the ultimate price for that conviction.

Through it all, she had a singular purpose. Sheila had taught her that her powers were steeped in the rules of nature, of balance, but that had never been Bonnie's intent. Bonnie was of the belief that with her power came responsibility. She was a guardian. She would give, did give, her dying breath to shield anyone who needed protecting, especially those she loved. In Mystic Falls, many needed protecting.

So no, as she tromped past the crowded bar and booths of the Grill, she was not herself. Forcibly possessing the body of her only remaining ally was not an action anyone would have ever associated with Bonnie Bennett.

But despite every loss, her duty endured. She would do what needed to be done to defend her loved ones and the innocent, ignorant people of her besieged town. She decided to seek out Aunt Zora herself.

What she hadn't anticipated was the interference of one nosy history teacher.

"Whoa, where are you going?" Alaric ran directly into her as she swept out the front door, though with Damon's well-toned vampire strength she wasn't moved at all from the force of their collision. He glanced at his watch. "There's at least... 2 more hours' worth of quality drinking for you and me, buddy."

"Something... came up," Bonnie said. She suppressed the flinch that came with the surreal experience of hearing Damon's voice intoning her words.

Alaric frowned. "C'mon man, that's the third time this week you've backed out. I know you don't have any friends. What could have possibly come up?"

"Uh... witchy juju... stuff?" Bonnie was rapidly realizing that being Damon Salvatore was not her forte.

"You saw Bonnie again? What did she say? Where are you going?"

What was this, some kind of interrogation? "The boardinghouse." That worked. The grimoire was there, and she needed that spell.

"Oh, I'll come with you. Your scotch is better than the Grill's anyw -"

"And then Atlanta. The boardinghouse and Atlanta." She hoped that Alaric wasn't a roadtrip enthusiast.

He stared at his friend curiously. For a split second she thought the gig was up, but then he replied, "... I've never been to Atlanta. Sounds good to me."

She frowned, flummoxed. Damon would have some ready, rude quip that would get the man off his tail, but she couldn't come up with anything.

After a moment, Alaric raised an eyebrow, and Bonnie realized she'd been silent too long and yet she still had nothing. She sighed. "Fine, whatever."

She and Alaric had never been close while she was alive.

She had far preferred him to Coach Tanner as a history teacher, and she respected his abilities as a hunter, but they had never had any reason to befriend each other.

For his part, the vague and fragmented memories he had of trying to kill her and being tortured by her in return while Klaus possessed his body had been something of a barrier.

Having collected the grimoire, they began the long drive down to Georgia.

Alaric was always more intuitive than anyone realized. His usual demeanor of quietly blending into the backdrop of whatever drama was unfolding generally led to people overlooking his abilities, but he was shrewd. And he could tell something was off with Damon.

He was determined to figure out what it was.

He tried to get the vampire to talk, asking vague questions about anything that might be relevant. He was surprised that Damon didn't refuse his inquiries immediately, but his answers were so brusque and increasingly irritated that it didn't seem too unusual.

He had asked about Damon's day, about Damon's conversation with Bonnie, about the gloomy winter weather, about their excursion to find the grimoire, about what all had happened at the Grill that evening before he'd arrived. Bonnie for her part gave what seemed to her to be stilted, awkward replies. She was not accustomed to spewing such an unabating, and frankly exhausting, stream of lies and non-answers.

"So what's happening in Atlanta?"

"Going to get the witch to bring Bonnie back," she replied flatly. She was attempting to keep her answers short, hoping to provide him less chance to pick up on any differences between her speech patterns and Damon's. So far, nothing seemed too amiss, though as the history teacher attempted to start conversation after conversation, she wondered that Damon of all people had the patience for this.

He frowned. "I thought you said you were going to call that off. Too dangerous for Bonnie, right?"

Bonnie cursed herself. She should have ditched the man back at the Grill. "She found a new spell."

Alaric looked puzzled. "Even then, it seems like magic always has consequences. And resurrecting a dead witch has got to be huge magic, right? What's the price for this one?"

"Hey, Rick?"

"Yeah."

"Shut up."

Alaric shrugged, but dropped the conversation. If anything, he was just surprised it took Damon that long to shut him down.

**As they pulled up to the** cozy two-story house, Bonnie glanced at Alaric. She opened the door and climbed out before leaning over the frame of the car to speak.

"Look, this might take a while. Why don't you make yourself scarce?"

He scoffed. "What am I supposed to do, sit in the car?"

She was about to suggest that that was a great idea, but Zora already had the front door open and was eyeing them both.

"What are you doing here? Please don't tell me you're loitering on Bennett property after the stunt you were going to pull."

Alaric gave his friend a suspicious look, and Bonnie did her best to ignore him.

"Look, I just want to talk."

The silver-haired witch sighed. "Alright, get inside, both of you."

Hearing he was invited, Alaric was smug as he shut the car door and marched up the path to the porch. Bonnie rolled her eyes.

Once they were inside, Alaric sat happily at the kitchen table while Zora offered them coffee and sweets. "I haven't had hummingbird cake since I was a little boy," he murmured.

Zora was rather obviously pleased with the vampire hunter.

Bonnie grabbed the witch's arm, pulling her aside. "I really need to speak to you… in private," she said, shooting a pointed glance to the man who was gorging himself obliviously at the table.

Zora looked down at the hand on her arm with recognition.

"Usually a vampire would be writhing on the ground by now, and most likely on fire, for touching me."

Bonnie dropped the woman's arm, her gaze plummeting sheepishly.

"In this case, I'll make an exception. We're family, after all." Her grey eyes looked into Damon's face knowingly.

Bonnie looked up in surprise. She nodded, a small smile crossing Damon's lips.

The pair of them adjourned to a small sitting room near the front of the house. Antique furniture crowded into every inch of the space, and an old piano sat dusty in the corner.

As they sat together on the plush loveseat, which was upholstered in pale golden damask, Bonnie started to explain. Zora held up her hand to stem Bonnie's words.

"Let me lay out what I'm thinking is going on, and you tell me if I'm hot or cold." She smiled a tight smile at the witch in the vampire's body.

Bonnie nodded.

"I'm guessing that after my phone conversation with Damon, he manned up to play his role as protector of the Bennett line for once and refused to help you with the spell." She glanced at Bonnie, who was nodding again. Her complacency was odd on Damon's features, which usually seemed to be twisting into some kind of smirk or sneer or discontent.

"So then you exploited your bond by possessing his body, coming here to talk me into performing the spell anyway."

Bonnie's eyes flickered guiltily to Damon's hands, clasped in his lap. "Pretty much, yeah."

Zora sighed. "We should have been there for you, Bonnie. You should have had every support and protection that your bloodline has to offer. Maybe then you wouldn't have…" Her silver bob shivered as she shook her head. "We truly believed that you were being kept from the life."

Bonnie laid her hand on Zora's knee, leaning forward. She removed it when she saw the discomfort plain on the witch's face to have the vampire's hand on her. "It wasn't your fault, Aunt Zora. It's just part of what comes from living in Mystic Fa – "

Zora interrupted her, the older witch's voice firm. "Since you didn't have the benefit of knowing the whole family, you may not really understand this, but Bennetts _always_ protect their own." She eyed Bonnie fiercely. "Even when they don't want to be protected."

Bonnie growled, the sound guttural and more vicious than she'd anticipated as it rumbled low in Damon's throat. "If you don't do this, Klaus is going to come back. Then more Bennetts, not to mention everyone else, will be in danger."

"We'll find another way, honey," Zora said, her tone shifting to gentleness.

"You know there's no other way!"

"We'll find one."

But Bonnie was still angry. She was tired of being underestimated, used, thrown away, and forgotten. The witches on the Other Side had grown tight-lipped when they discovered her plans, even Grams. Especially Grams. Meanwhile, her only ally was buried deep in his own subconscious against his will. She knew he'd probably hate her when she let him back out.

So she was not in the mood to be told "No" yet again. She'd given too much and come too far, she was going to do what needed to be done. "If it's in my power to fix this, it's my decision," she repeated the earlier sentiment she'd spoken to Damon.

Zora's lips set in a thin, tense line. The girl was stubborn, definitely a Bennett. "Fine. But are you willing to make that decision for someone else too?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You're a witch who blood bonded with a vampire. Between the volatile magic you performed on the night you died, and my own strengthening of that bond later on, that bond is extremely powerful. If I perform this resurrection, most likely your spirit isn't the only one that will be affected. Damon's would suffer the same damage."

"I'm surprised he has a fully functioning soul to damage in the first place," Bonnie blustered, but it did give her pause.

The silver-haired witch continued. "Don't take it lightly. You trusted this man enough to blood bond with him. If you hurt him like this, you'll never forgive yourself."

Bonnie scoffed. "It wasn't like all that. He's _Damon_."

"Maybe not, but trust is trust."

Bonnie sighed.

Perhaps it was because of all the stress she was under, or perhaps it was because she felt safe around another Bennett witch, but Bonnie was uncharacteristically open. "We were always at each other's throats, but I did eventually trust him." She frowned, Damon's mouth bending crookedly with the emotion. "And since I died, he's changed... or maybe this is what he always was, but he hid it too well and I wasn't paying enough attention. I can't really explain it."

But her aunt was right, she couldn't do that to him.

"Whoa." Alaric's exclamation was soft from where he stood in the foyer watching them, a full plate held in his hand. His fork was suspended halfway between the plate and his mouth, a bite of cake resting on the tines. "Bonnie?"

Bonnie groaned. "You have _got_ to be kidding me." She turned to the witch. "Thank you, Aunt Zora. For everything."

Before Zora or Alaric could react, Bonnie released her hold on Damon's body, which collapsed into an uncomfortably contorted position on the sofa.

The witch murmured into the empty air. "We take care of our own, child." She glanced back to Alaric, who was still frozen with his fork in mid-shovel. "How much did you hear?"

The utensil dropped onto his plate with a clatter, and he plopped down on the sofa next to Damon's unconscious body. "Are you asking if I heard the part where the spell would break Damon's soul too, or the part where ghost Bonnie hasn't figured out yet that she's falling for a jerk vampire?"

Zora shook her head with a sigh. "You'd best just keep it all to yourself."

"I'm good with secrets." He took another bite of cake.

**Damon was furious, to say** the least. The Camaro revved faithfully in response to the angry jabbing of his foot on the gas pedal as they hurtled down the dark, deserted highway.

In the passenger seat, Alaric was bored. Grumpy Damon was hardly a new phenomenon, in his opinion. He flipped through the grimoire, its pages crackling noisily.

Damon wrenched the book from his hands and launched it into the back seat.

The history teacher shrugged, and both men were quiet for a while.

Damon seethed in silence. He couldn't believe she would do that to him. That judgy little creature who always had such a hard on for being in control, how could she think it would be okay to take that away from someone else? Who did she think she was?

His thoughts were interrupted as Alaric turned to him and said, "So you basically had a girl inside you for like 12 hours. That's pretty kinky."

Damon rolled his eyes. "Seriously, Rick? You watch too much television."

Alaric smirked. "Come on, like you could have passed that up."

Despite himself, the vampire chuckled.

_**The heat was overwhelming, excruciating.**__ The fire had yet to singe his skin, but he felt it all around him, harsh and unforgiving. He felt weak, and try as he might he was unable to crawl away from the inferno._

_And then cool arms wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him onto his wobbly legs and tugging him away._

_His feet dragged uselessly against the stairs, knocking against each one as the arms hauled him up and out of the blaze. Oddly, the flames seemed to part before them._

_He looked up at his savior, and his brother's mossy green eyes gazed back, lines of worry etched thick into his brow._

_A burst of soothing cold air hit his skin as they escaped into the dry autumn night._

_She stood there, her body wilting tiredly in her gown as it billowed in the breeze created by the rushing vampires. She had been clutching Elena's arm, but the brunette stepped away, abandoning her to help Stefan support his brother. _

_With Elena's and Stefan's arms holding him up, he lifted his head through the haze of vervain and muted adrenaline._

_She looked back at him somberly, as if unable to look away._

_In her eyes he saw something unfamiliar. Not quite an apology, but something like regret. And then there was the very familiar weight of guilt. He wasn't able to look away either._

_He should have despised her. If she were anyone else, he would have snapped her neck without pause for her betrayal, for not de-spelling the Gilbert device. But instead, all he had felt was gratitude, and some kind of wonder._

_Why did these people decide that he was worth saving, in the end? He wasn't, after all. He wasn't a good person, he wasn't a hero like Bonnie or virtuous like Elena, or even trying like Stefan._

_It felt like eons flew by as their eyes remained locked on each other. Or perhaps no time passed at all. _

_The glimmer of tears formed a sheen over her emerald irises. That hadn't happened the first time around._

_"Bonnie?" he croaked weakly._

_She reached one arm out shakily to brush against his cheek. Just before her fingers graced his skin, he woke up._

* * *

_**A/N: OMG YOU GUYS. As much as I had fun writing this chapter, it was also kind of hellish. I mean, have you ever tried to write Bonnie Bennett not only having a conversation with season 2 Alaric of all people, but also while pretending to be Damon? Don't! It is excruciatingly painful! Hopefully it was less painful to read, though I have my doubts. LOL sorry guys!**_

_**Was the whole possession arc a poor excuse for that final Supernatural allusion? Yes? No? Maybe? I'll never tell. I say "was" like it's over, but it's not, as there will be fallout obviously. But still. I'll try to restrain myself better with the self-indulgent Supernatural references.**_

_**For the guest reviewers! Guest1: **__Thank you! :D,__** fan girl: **__OMGGG WHAT, you're so kind! That's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about my writing, thank you! I was so completely obsessed with the St. Clare's series when I was younger, you've really taken me back, LOL. I hope you enjoyed the new chapter!_

_**Thank you guys soooo much for all the amazing reviews, PMs, tumblr notes, tweets, favorites, and follows! You're seriously blowing my mind, lol. I really hope you liked this chapter, as it's the first time we've had a lot of Bonnie-centered stuff happening. Love you guys!**_


	9. 09 Through Walls and Harvest Moons

_********__Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer._

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Muse – Sing for Absolution, Reliant K – Curl Up and Die**_

* * *

_**This kid had been watching**__ too many of those Saw movies, he realized as the scrawny werewolf yanked on the ropes attached to the spiked wooden collar around Damon's neck. More vervain-soaked binding tied him to the arms and legs of the chair he was seated upon, burning agonizingly on his skin every time he shifted._

_The coward gave a bold sneer from his place a safe distance across the room. Around him, the rest of his pack snickered to see the vampire groan in pain. _

_Even more than the spikes digging viciously into Damon's neck, he dreaded what he knew was coming next. Elijah was going to be the one to waltz in and save him from the rowdy pack of dogs._

_He wondered what would happen to the man if he killed him in his dream._

_When the mutts began to fall to the floor one by one, clutching their heads pathetically, he sighed. Soon enough, he knew Jonas Martin's looming figure would appear at the entryway._

_Irritated, he didn't even bother to watch the door, turning instead with some pleasure to see the collapse of each of his captors._

_Citrus, honey, sage. That wasn't Mister Man-Witch _or _the Baron von Douchenstein._

_He looked up as she approached him, the hem of her gown sweeping over the regrettably bloodied carpet. Her fingers grasped the collar wrapped around his neck, carefully undoing it and removing it. She winced as his mangled flesh was revealed beneath, but already he felt it knitting back together. She reached out involuntarily to wipe away some of the blood._

_Her fingers swept down from his neck, but she pulled her hand away as if suddenly realizing her own actions._

_He had the abrupt urge to reach out and pull her to him, but his hands were still restrained. "Judgy, c'mere."_

_She looked up to meet his gaze in a moment of confusion. He stared back at her, intent clear in his icy blue eyes._

_After a moment's pause, she leaned down and pressed her lips to his. _

_He seemed to be trying to make up for his inability to touch her with his hands, kissing her back hungrily, possessively. He leaned forward, struggling helplessly against his bonds as she pulled away._

_She slid one leg at a time through the armrests, and he watched the hem of her gown ride up to reveal the smooth brown skin. "I'm still mad at you, you know," he murmured, eyes fixed downwards as she straddled him. She settled firmly into his lap as the sliding fabric exposed her thighs._

"_Well I still don't like you, so we're even, Salvatore." Her arms wrapped around his now healed neck, and she leaned her mouth into his again, her breasts pressing against his chest. Their bodies were separated by nothing but his jeans and the thin fabric of her gown._

_He groaned against her lips, and she seemed to notice as he fought against the toxic ropes. Her lips lingered on the skin of his jaw as her eyes fluttered open, long lashes brushing against his cheek._

_"You should untie me," he murmured. He took hold of whatever part of her that he could with his mouth, sucking bruises on her neck and nipping at the lobe of her ear._

_She ignored his words. Her hands began to roam, much to his pleasure and torment. Soft fingertips danced across the bare skin of his torso, and he bucked against her when she teasingly traced her way down his treasure trail._

"_Is this real?" he breathed against her neck. "Is this really you in my dreams?"_

"_You talk too much, Damon." Her lips found his again. Her fingers trailed down to hook into his waistband, and she moaned as he ground his hips up into her hot core, feeling his dick straining desperately behind the seam of his jeans._

_He felt her gasp, a sharp intake of breath from his mouth to hers. A loud click echoed around them as her grip abandoned his jeans and tightened almost painfully on his forearms. When he smelled her blood, his eyes flew open._

_The collar was snapped around her neck, and a fierce tug embedded the wooden spikes into her soft skin, pulling her away from him. She cried out and tumbled to the ground._

_Elijah's visage was vague behind her, as the scent of her blood threatened to overwhelm Damon. The Original's mouth was set in a terse, unfeeling line. He was not taking pleasure from his actions but was determined to complete them all the same._

_Bonnie's eyes brimmed with hurt and fear, and something unexpected: betrayal. "How could you let this happen to me?" she whispered._

_He thrashed in his bonds, the vervain ropes digging painfully into his wrists as he tried frantically, vainly, to free himself. There was nothing he could do._

**He had shunned her for** over two weeks after the possession.

Not that it was easy to avoid thinking about her. Ironically, now that he wasn't desperately trying to see her, the bond was somehow strong enough that she seemed to appear anytime she crossed his mind more than fleetingly. Which was often.

He saw her in the library on cold afternoons, hovering beside his bed as he fell asleep, silhouetted against the mirror behind the bar at the Grill, and one memorable time standing beside him in the shower, her fingers slapped firmly over her eyes. Every time, he managed to quickly shut her back out, watching with grim discontent as her form flickered and faded away.

But he couldn't keep her out of his dreams, which became incessant in her daytime absence. Every night's rest was interrupted by her face, the hurt and sometimes regret in her eyes eating away at him.

Despite their impasse, he knew they couldn't afford to delay their plans to thwart Elijah. At a loss for how to resurrect Bonnie without using the forbidden spell, he spent his daylight hours researching ways to destroy the amulet, the key to everything else.

He tried smashing it, the uncomfortable reverberations from each impact buzzing through the bones of his arm. The talisman wasn't even dented, though he used his vampiric strength and splintered the handle right off the hammer.

He tried melting it, stoking the dry wood fire in the hearth patiently for hours one night. The soft silver didn't warp in the slightest.

He even took it to the chem lab at Mystic Falls High and compelled the chemistry teacher to dunk it in nitric acid. Ms. Yagoda looked on with glazed eyes as nothing happened.

Finally he glared at the thing in disgust and took the flamethrower to it. Still, no dice.

He was forced to conclude that if magic made it, magic must be the only thing to destroy it. He muttered many a choice phrase about witches that night.

He concealed the amulet again, and without Bonnie's presence he quickly found himself running out of options. Unwinding in the boardinghouse afterwards, he wondered if Zora might know what to do.

"I must say I am surprised to find you here. One really should consider moving to a more secure location when one has Original vampires on one's tail."

Elijah's voice was velvet and silk, resonating from the entrance to the parlor.

Damon didn't bother to even open his eyes, reclined in an armchair with his head tilted back lazily. "I'm not worried."

The Original's eyes flashed with anger. "That's the problem with you young vampires, no respect for your betters."

Damon felt strong arms yanking him up by his shirt, and his back slammed hard against one of the walls. His eyes were now open, and he stared coolly to meet Elijah's gaze.

He felt the point of Elijah's stake digging threateningly into his chest as it had before. To Damon, now seemed an excellent time to gloat. "You won't do it. If you kill me, you'll never find the talisman. No talisman, no Klaus, no touching family reunion."

Elijah's jaw clicked, but he lowered the stake and stepped away. He shook out his jacket and realigned his cuffs. "I realize the Bennett witch is assisting you from beyond the grave. Personally, I find it all rather trite in an unlikely, Nicholas Sparks kind of way, but to each their own."

"Someone's been doing his homework and sucking up to teacher. Would you like a gold star?" Damon sneered.

Elijah ignored him. "I am here to offer you a trade: the amulet for the resurrection of the Bennett witch."

Damon's interest was piqued now. "How would you manage that?"

"I know my fair share of witches, including some rather uncommon and interesting ones who practice darker magic. And unlike you, most of them survive my acquaintance."

A tic in the muscle of Damon's jaw was the only indication he heard the latter statement. "Dark magic. Human sacrifice level dark magic?"

Elijah nodded slightly, his arms folded across his chest in nonchalance. "It will require a human sacrifice, but it will call her spirit back into her body."

Damon wasn't one to wring his hands too much over a little human death, and he seemed to be considering Elijah's proposal.

Suddenly the carpet was on fire.

"Oh cut it out, Judgy. So dramatic."

Elijah arched his eyebrow.

Damon continued, "I'm not stupid enough to actually make a deal with a proven traitor like Count Pomade here. You being alive won't be good for him anyway, so duh it's a trap. Plus the Persian rug is a low blow, you know that." The flames snuffed themselves out, and the carpet was unmarred.

Elijah stared at him furiously. "We only want the same thing, Damon, in the end. To be reunited with our loved ones."

Damon smirked. The Original was at a dead end, and he knew it. "The difference is, unlike you, I have _options_."

It was still sort of true, anyway.

Elijah ran his hands down the front of his jacket, smoothing the already impeccable fabric. "Think on it for a while, then. But don't take too long, or I will be forced to resort to _less desirable_ measures." In a flash of motion, he was gone.

Damon collapsed back onto the couch. He felt the air rustle beside him, and he turned and saw Bonnie sitting at the other end. He sighed.

When she wasn't shut out after a moment, Bonnie too exhaled.

"Look, I feel bad about the hijacking."

The vampire snorted. "Yeah, so if you ever do that again, I'm going to take Elijah up on his offer, bring you back to life with the darkest dark magic and the most human of human sacrifices, and then I'll kill you myself."

Her mouth twisted unhappily. "I'd like to see you try."

"Don't tempt me, Witchy."

She sighed. "I won't. I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry."

He inclined his head towards her silently. These were new words from her mouth to his ears.

"So what made you finally come to your senses about that spell?"

She was blasé, shrugging. "It wasn't going to work, Aunt Zora was right."

"Oh, was Zora the one stopping you? That's weird, I remember it differently. I think you mean _someone else _was right, don't you?" He smirked at her.

She rolled her eyes. "Don't push it, Damon. Anyway, we'll just have to find another way."

"We better find another way fast, then. Elijah surely spends the majority of his day on his hair conditioning routine, but he's apparently still finding time to snoop."

"I'll see if any of the witches over here will talk to me, now that we aren't doing that spell."

He nodded. "And I'll cast my net on this side."

They both settled into their places on the opposite ends of the couch, facing one another. The weight of the tasks ahead was heavy upon them, and the comfortable silence provided an unspoken moment of reprieve.

He was the one to speak again. "What's the first thing you'll do once you're back?"

She took in a deep breath, pensive. "I'll probably run down to the Grill and drink at least three chocolate milkshakes."

He grinned, his eyebrows raised in bemusement.

"You'd be surprised how much you miss a good milkshake when you can't ever have one again."

"Hmm, fair enough."

They fell back into silence. A few minutes passed, and this time she was the one to break the quiet.

"I miss it all, really."

He looked back up at her as she continued.

"I miss Elena smiling at me, and Caroline's spine-shattering hugs. And feeling the sun, and the way the football field smelled whenever they mowed it during cheerleading practice."

The corners of his mouth were tense with a strange, pained frown.

"But now we're back at square one." She swallowed thickly, but he knew she wouldn't cry in front of him.

He had to fight the useless urge to wrap his arms around her, both unsure if she would welcome his comfort and knowing they'd just pass right through her huddled form if he even tried. He realized that Bonnie had held herself with so much poise and audacity that it was easy to forget: at the heart of things, she had always been just as vulnerable as any other mortal girl. It was so easy to forget, in fact, that she got killed before he truly understood.

"You deserved better," he finally said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. "You shouldn't have died that night. You deserve a full, happy life. Out of all of us, you should get to do all those Hallmark things, to fall in love and have a family and grow old."

She couldn't help staring at him, surprised by his admission. "I would do it again," she assured him.

"I know you would."

_**He listened to the silence**__ that remained as he pulled his key from the ignition and the rumble of his car's engine came to an end._

_Warm Virginia sunlight streamed through the open windows. It had been a long time since he'd been in Mystic Falls. He made it a habit to check in on all of the Bennett witches over the years, but recalled that Abby was a slippery one to track._

_He looked up at the house, and he saw a small figure scurrying in the wooded enclosure off to one side. The last time he'd been here, he'd only had half a moment to wonder about her before he saw the glint of bright green eyes and all but confirmed that she was a Bennett._

_He had been confused at the time as to why no one had told him about her._

_He focused his hearing and had no trouble picking up the tiny shrill of her voice as she spoke to herself._

_"Of course, Ms. Bear. We have your room all ready, in fact. Please, let the bellboy take your things and follow me, I'll show you there myself."_

_He saw her grab the bedraggled brown teddy bear, carrying it to a separate area within the enclosure. A dense layer of pinestraw and dead leaves crunched beneath her tennis shoes._

_She placed Ms. Bear atop a pile of stacked logs. "Here we are, ma'am. It's the penthouse suite. Our restaurant is open now, so feel free to freshen up and come down for some fine dining." She strode back across the enclosure, leaving Ms. Bear to her own devices in her opulent new living arrangements._

_Bonnie sat beside an old gnarled stump, methodically stirring a puddle of mud with a stick._

_He climbed out of the car and approached her. "Hey there," he smiled._

_She looked up with a frown. "I don't know you."_

_He offered her his outstretched hand. "I'm Damon. It's a pleasure to meet you."_

_"I'm not supposed to talk to people I don't know." She stared at his hand and continued frowning. _

_"Well you know me now." He held his hands up defensively. "Besides, I'm just here to book a room for the night."_

_Her frown faltered as a spark lit behind her eyes. "Well, Mr. Damon… I guess if it's _business_, that's different."_

_He grinned. "Exactly. And you can call me Damon. What can I call you?"_

_"I'm Mrs. Flowers, this is my hotel," she proclaimed haughtily._

_"Oh, Mrs.? Who's the lucky fella who snapped up a successful young businesswoman like you?"_

_She jumped to her feet and ran back to the sidewalk, where a pile of stuffed animals were strewn haphazardly. Plucking a faded orange cat from the mess, she brought it back to him. She made a fuss of arranging the creature's bowtie as she said, "This is Mr. Flowers. Mr. Flowers, meet Damon."_

_Damon solemnly nodded to the stuffed cat. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Flowers. You have excellent taste in women." The cat's beady green eyes stared back at him glassily._

_The girl made a face, but continued. "Mr. Flowers and I welcome you to our estambli… our estabish… estambishm…"_

_"Establishment," he filled in for her, only to be met by a scowl._

_"Welcome to our _hotel_. Would you like a balcony view?"_

_He couldn't help smiling. "Now that I think of it, I'm looking for someone. Is your mom home?"_

_She froze. Tears sprang into her eyes, and he remembered it was the wrong thing to say._

_"Actually, on second thought, I would like that balcony view."_

_Heavy, rolling tears began to overflow as she set her mouth in a stubborn frown. She turned away and ran for the house. "Daddy! DAD!"_

_After a moment, a panicked Rudy came rushing out the front door. "Baby, what's wrong?" She buried her face in his shirt and shook her head._

_Rudy looked up and frowned, noticing the vampire. "You."_

_Damon sneered. "Me."_

_"Abby told you to leave us alone."_

_He shrugged. "A guy's got obligations. Speaking of Abby…"_

_Rudy held up a hand to silence him, before crouching down to face his daughter. "Honey, why don't you go play for a while? I'll handle this from here." He smoothed away the last of the tears streaking down her cheeks with the pad of his thumb. She gulped, nodding._

_Bonnie glanced back at Damon only once, her face twisted with a surprising amount of mistrust for one so young. She turned and went to her pile of toys on the sidewalk._

_This was the part where he and Rudy were supposed to have a tense conversation about Abby, who had left two weeks prior. She was gone, Bonnie was hurt and confused, and Rudy was at a loss for how to keep going._

_But all Damon really wanted to do was go back to Bonnie. He wished then that he'd spent more time checking up on her as she was growing up, that he'd had a chance to know what she was like before she layered on all that armor to fend off the world. To fend off harsh realities like Damon himself._

_He turned back to the girl, but Rudy caught his attention again. "Don't you dare. You leave her alone, she's not going to have anything to do with that life." The man glared at the vampire._

_Damon rolled his eyes. If only he knew._

_He was surprised though as Rudy's eyes widened, staring at something behind him, over his shoulder. "Bonnie! Get out of there!"_

_This hadn't happened last time. To Damon, with his vampire reflexes and the sudden rush of adrenaline, everything seemed to nearly screech to a halt, proceeding in slow motion._

_He turned and saw Bonnie as she went to retrieve a stuffed animal that had somehow made its way into the street. Hearing her father's voice, she paused and looked up. Barreling directly towards her was a van, moving far too fast._

_Without thinking, Damon flew to her. His arms hooked under hers and his momentum knocked them both to the opposite sidewalk. The van rushed carelessly past them less than a second later. With a deft twist of his torso, he skidded across the concrete on his back, the girl landing soft and safe against his chest._

_As he woke, he could still feel the child's hands clinging to the fabric of his shirt._

* * *

**A/N: Hi lovelies! Tomorrow's moving day, so I should probably be packing or something, but... I'd rather be here :D**

**True story, my sister and I played "Hotel" ALL THE TIME as kids. Our hotel had a lobby, a dance floor, a kitchen (we made mud casserole, mud pie, mud cake, basically mud anything you could garnish with pine cones), a dining hall, and rooms for a variety of clientele. There was even a "vault," which was basically a hole in the ground where we buried particularly smooth or oddly colored rocks for safekeeping. I'm just trying to explain that it was the best game ever, and you should give it a try if you never have before.**

**I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter! Not as much action as past chapters, but it laid the groundwork for some shifts in character that I'm desperately trying to segue to.**

**No guest reviewers this time, so PMs all around! :D**

**Thank you guys again SO MUCH for all of your amazing reviews and notes and everything here and other places like twitter and tumblr! I'm honestly amazed by all of it! Love you guuuuuys!**


	10. 10 Clinging to the Remnants

**__********_Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer._**

**_Chapter Soundtrack:_ **_**Pan's Labyrinth - Pan's Labyrinth Lullaby, Madredeus – Ao Longe O Mar**_

* * *

_**The flames in the fireplace**__ crackled and flared restlessly. He found something at once comforting and thrilling about a fire, one of the many things about him that endured his 150 years of unlife._

_Yet no solace had enveloped him the last time he sat before this dancing blaze. Stefan held vigil over him a polite distance away, and for once Damon didn't find his concern cloying. He had discovered only hours before that the woman he had loved, obsessed over, for each of those 150 undead years had never returned his feelings after all._

_It seemed like the sort of thing one should perhaps drop a note about at some point in the first decade or so at minimum, didn't it? _Hello darling, FYI I'm actually totally alive and also I never loved you. xoxo

_As much as he had wanted to pretend to be above his pain, the truth was that he'd been completely helpless. It had been a moment of dark epiphany; the twisted love that he had believed nourished him through all those years turned out to be emptiness all along. The hollowness that came rushing in was unbearable in its sudden clarity. _

_His pride stung to know that she had laughed at him for over a century. It seemed he was a nothing but a joke that never grew old, for Katherine._

_But now that sting was a mere memory to Damon. The lingering feelings he had held for the vampire despite her betrayal had long since faded into obscure disdain._

_So when Stefan's phone rang, this time he noticed._

_With his enhanced hearing, he discerned Elena's shaky voice on the other end of the line. Sheila Bennett was dead._

_Stefan paused for only a moment to digest the news, asking at once after Bonnie._

_Elena's voice became a muffled whisper, as she attempted to speak without alerting the witch. Bonnie was inconsolable, and Elena didn't know what to do. She asked Stefan to come to Sheila's house, she knew that he would know just the words to say._

_As he slipped silently out the door, Damon heard Stefan hesitating, murmuring to his girlfriend that he wasn't sure if he should leave his brother._

_Moments later, Damon stood on the front porch that used to belong to Sheila Bennett. He watched through the living room window as Bonnie sat on the sofa, her form collapsed into a crumpled huddle. Elena knelt next to her, rubbing her back comfortingly, but she hardly appeared to notice._

_This was his fault. He had done all of this to her. If he hadn't been such a fool for Katherine, if he hadn't been such a fool in general, the tomb would have remained sealed and Bonnie's life would have been so different. She would have had a mentor, she would have had someone there to protect her better than he had in her fight against Klaus. Hell, Sheila would have kept her out of the fight against Klaus entirely._

_He had done this._

_Elena looked up and noticed him. "Damon."_

_His eyes never left the witch. "Bonnie, can I come in?" he asked through the pane of glass._

_Her eyes never met the vampire's, as she continued to stare forward blankly. But she nodded, barely._

_He opened the front door and walked directly to her, sliding beside her on the couch and gathering her up in his arms. He pulled her closer as her tears began afresh. Her fingers gripped his shirt as her whole body shook with wracking sobs. He whispered into her hair soothingly, wordlessly._

_Elena looked on, confused._

**He was determined to bring** her back. Their conversation made it ever more clear in his mind that she never should have died.

As he sat in the plush first class seat and stared out the window towards the wing of the small plane, he considered his growing obsession with bringing Bonnie back. Fixation was familiar territory for Damon, there was nothing terribly disconcerting about that in itself.

But he wasn't the hero. He knew this.

He'd made his attempts at the role in the past. He had been certain he would save Katherine, but that had not worked out as he had expected. He never had much of a hand in pulling Stefan away from his Ripper persona, though he had tried in his own way; his brother had needed Lexi for that. And despite all of his declarations, there had been nothing he could do to keep Elena alive: that had all been Bonnie and Johnathan Gilbert's doing, in the end.

Still, it wasn't really saving her if it was partially his fault that she was lost in the first place, right? He could have seen it coming, he should have gotten between her and Elijah that night.

He should have stopped putting her front and center in their little plans to begin with.

He didn't, though, and working to undo the consequences of that didn't really put him in hero territory, he decided. It barely put him in redemption territory, in fact, and that was the most he could hope for as far as Bonnie was concerned.

It had been weeks since they had sat together in the boardinghouse and she had confessed her desire to have her life back for her own reasons beyond fighting Klaus. The moment was a striking one for Damon, who recognized that she so rarely spoke in that way, so rarely bared openly her own wants and needs.

He frowned to himself as one of the baggage handlers outside carelessly tossed a suitcase that looked an awful lot like his own onto the conveyor belt, depositing it into the belly of the aircraft. Unfortunately, they were no nearer to bringing Bonnie back, despite the time that had passed.

Her attempts to rally help on the Other Side were met with what he considered to be irritatingly firm resistance. The witches were adamant that it would be impossible. Resurrection was too much of a disruption to the fabric of reality for the rules of nature to allow it, and the bounds of nature were sacrosanct.

Meanwhile, Damon found that despite the living being far more willing to claim such things possible, none seemed to be particularly capable of the feat. It started out promisingly enough, as he visited with witches of varying repute. But one by one, each plan fell apart as spells backfired, magical artifacts fizzled and inter-dimensional portals of legend failed to truly exist. Every rumored method of resurrection that did not require dark sacrifice was turning out to be a dud.

He soon found himself scraping the bottom of the barrel.

His latest attempt evolved when he visited an alleged mystic who turned out to be a man in a plaid shirt and flip flops, reading palms out of the dingy living room of his condo in San Jose. The man swore that he had once met a djinn, a supernatural creature who could grant any wish, no matter how unnatural. The man conspiratorially divulged that this was how he had come about his (questionably) incredible powers of clairvoyance.

As the conversation meandered hopelessly, Damon's patience dwindled. Still, he was desperate enough to try.

The evening after his flight, he stood at the exact crossroads specified by the mystic as daylight rapidly gave way to dusk. The rough dirt roads were typical for the locale, carving soft pathways through the lush land surrounding the backwaters of rural southern India. The monsoons were still weeks away, and the sweltering heat was overwhelming as it cocooned him in a muggy haze.

Tall stands of rubber trees climbed ever skyward along one side of the road, and in the distance he could see the glistening, rushing darkness of one of the countless backwater channels that flowed through the area, skirting the sea. At the edges of the crossroads, tiny white flowers bloomed in clusters: pavetta, as the palm reader had promised.

He plucked a few of the fragile blossoms, adding them to the contents of a small metal box. As the man had instructed, Damon buried the box at the exact center of the crossroads as the sun set. And then he waited.

And waited.

Minutes passed, then hours. After a near collision with an auto rickshaw that had flown past him in the dark, beeping angrily, he finally sat on his haunches beside one of the pavetta shrubs at the edge of the crossroads. Frustration clenched in his chest.

He wondered exactly when he had become this person who honestly believed he could manage to do something right.

But at the same time, he knew it had everything to do with Bonnie. He was supposed to bring her back. He knew it in some visceral, inexplicable way. He had failed her once, and he wouldn't fail her again.

Despite being discouraged by their clear lack of progress, something was at once shocking and comforting about the realization that he himself was changed in even the slightest way because of her.

He also wondered exactly when he had become this person who was grateful for anyone else's influence.

Still, as rays from the dawning sun poked holes through the mist surrounding the rubber trees, he knew he'd hit another dead end.

**The knock on his door** two nights after his return from India heralded a slightly inebriated Alaric, clutching a half empty bottle of good bourbon.

Damon wasn't one to turn down good bourbon.

"I hope you didn't drive here."

"Cab," Alaric muttered as he swaggered through the door.

They both collapsed onto armchairs in the parlor, and Damon held out his tumbler while Alaric poured, generously. "So what's the occasion?"

The history teacher shrugged. "Since when do we need a reason to break out the good stuff?"

Damon smirked. "Good thing, too, or else we'd never see it."

Alaric didn't reply, taking a swig straight from the nearly empty bottle instead.

A couple of hours later, the bourbon was long gone and they'd started in on Damon's stash. Even with his vampire metabolism, Damon felt buzzed. Alaric, on the other hand, was completely smashed.

"Hey. Hey, Damon," he slurred.

"Yeah."

"What's up with you and Bonnie?"

"What about me and Bonnie?"

"How's the ghost sex?"

Damon definitely wasn't drunk enough for this. "So we've gone from me being just some whacko hallucinating her to somehow sleeping with her ghost? How would that work, anyway?"

Alaric chortled for a bit before pausing. Then he chortled some more.

"I think you've had enough, buddy." Damon rolled his eyes.

"I heard her talking to Zora, you've gotta be doing _something_."

Damon sneered. "What are you talking about?"

"I mean, why d'you think she didn't do that spell?"

Damon's buzz was abruptly gone. "What do you mean?"

Alaric sluggishly considered that maybe he wasn't supposed to mention some things sometimes. Right? He was pretty sure, anyway.

"Rick, focus. Why didn't Bonnie go through with the spell?"

"I dunno, I forget," the history teacher frowned.

"_Rick_."

He gave a sigh, seemingly heavy with the weight of the world. "Itwouldaawelkndleswooul," he mumbled.

"What?"

Alaric grumbled. "It would have broken your soul."

Damon's grip tightened on his glass. He realized Bonnie was acting the martyr again, but this time it was for him.

**Later that night, Alaric was** passed out on the couch and Damon lay awake in his bed.

Would he give up his soul, his afterlife, to bring her back? He had already established that he wasn't exactly some kind of savior, and that definitely qualified as savior-type behavior.

But then she deserved to live, and after all that he'd done in his long, wretched life, he probably did deserve to die in such a way. It occurred to him that it would be some kind of justice if they could have simply traded places. If anyone was worthy of such a sacrifice, it was her.

A glimmer at the edge of his vision signaled her wavering form as it appeared at the foot of his bed. He sat up.

The vision of Bonnie solidified, and she climbed onto the bed to sit as well, facing him.

"So you're the only one allowed to make sacrifices, is that how this works?"

Bonnie grimaced. "He wasn't supposed to say anything. And yeah, maybe I am."

Damon frowned at her. "You ought to be more selfish, Witchy. There's no rule that you have to be the sacrificial lamb over and over."

"It sounds nice, but it's not true. It was never going to end well for somebody like me."

He narrowed his eyes. "Maybe you don't always need to be that somebody."

"If not me, then who was it going to be? There's good in this world, and it deserves to be protected." Her eyes were alight as she stared at him, daring him to disagree.

He grew quiet at that. It struck him that _he_ was what she'd decided was good enough to merit protecting in this case. "And what do you deserve, Bonnie?"

She frowned.

"All those things that you told me you missed about being alive, you're allowed to want those things for yourself. It wouldn't be the end of the world if you let yourself forget the other stuff for a minute and just want to be alive again because you deserve to be alive again."

She shook her head with a sigh. "Except it's still not true, no matter how many ways you say it. If I let myself just forget the big problems, who's going to remember? Who'll remember who can really do anything about them? This is Klaus we're talking about, it _would_ be the end of the world."

Anger tinged his voice as he continued, "If you really believe that, then you're just going to die again, one way or another. You should want better."

"I don't have that luxury, don't you get it?" she insisted. "I'm all alone in this."

"No, you're not." He watched as her eyes dropped from his face to the bedspread. "Other people can make the sacrifices sometimes."

"_That's_ not a sacrifice I could ask anyone to make, let alone you." Her index finger was trailing small circles into his sheets.

His eyebrow rose curiously.

"Anyway, you seemed pretty set against it when it was just me, not like that changes just because it's both of us instead."

His shoulders slumped as his righteousness deflated. He'd thought it would just be him. "Fine. We'll keep looking."

Bonnie's gaze lingered on him thoughtfully for a moment before sinking away again, and they fell into a comfortable silence. He leaned back against the headboard, and he thought he could feel the bed moving as she repeatedly kicked one of her legs over the side of the mattress.

His mind wandered back to Alaric's drunken rambling. Was ghost sex a thing, anyway? Now that the concept was there in his head, it seemed to have taken up residence permanently.

She noticed him staring at her and found the odd look on his face somewhat worrisome. "What?"

"Have they covered ghost witch sex ed in your Other Side orientation classes yet?" He smirked at her.

She wrinkled her nose. "You're disgusting."

"You don't know the half of it, Judgy."

"I'm out." She stood, needlessly, as her form began to fade.

He reached out towards her. "Bonnie, wait."

"What?"

"Just stay."

She paused, eyeing him warily. But her gaze softened. As he slid down to lie atop the sheets, she climbed back onto the mattress, settling beside him. He couldn't really feel her, but there was a jarring, tingling chill anywhere her body was in contact with his.

It was like ice and sparks. Disorienting, but somehow it felt soothing at the same time.

He was so focused on the sensation that he nearly startled when she spoke again. "Honoria Fell said to tell you that you're still the child who pulled her hair in the schoolyard. That you haven't aged a day in 160 years, at least mentally."

He laughed, and the sound was full-throated and genuine. He himself hadn't heard that laugh in a very long time. "So you see what I meant about the stuck up bitch thing, right?"

Bonnie rolled her eyes. "I like her, actually. She's been teaching me a lot about how magic works on the Other Side. It's different when you're dead, less powerful but less restricted too."

He tilted his head to the side to watch her. He felt the wriggling chill of her fingers as they brushed against his own. "I would have figured Sheila would be the one to teach you all the witchy tricks over there."

The smile that spread across her lips was unmistakable, and he would have sworn that it lit her face, her body, the entire room. She flipped onto her side, facing him. He felt the loss of her strange touch, but when that smile turned upon him he forgot his discontent.

"She is, too. It's kind of nice actually, I forgot what it was like to have help with my magic. It wasn't like this before, I was fighting blind half the time."

He realized with a pang that she had to die to get that love and support that she needed.

Her eyes flitted up to look into his face. "You know, in a way I'm glad all of this happened. I'll know how to do things right when I'm back. And when my time really comes, I won't have to be scared, knowing who and what all's waiting over there."

His jaw tensed but he said nothing. She rolled onto her back again, shuffling against him and closing her eyes. Goosebumps broke out over the flesh of his arm from its place draped across the opposite pillow, shrouded by her curls.

He made a silent promise to himself that when she was back, he wouldn't let her go without that kind of support again.

He twirled his finger in her hair, and almost believed that a lock of it wrapped around his digit rather than simply passing through.

_**The vampire before him looked** familiar. He was sure he'd known the man, or at least seen the man, prior to the fateful events of 1864._

_The vampire before him was also rushing at him with a stake._

_A loud _whoosh_ resounded around them, and suddenly the man he thought he might have known was engulfed in flames. The stake clattered on the floor as it was dropped, and the man threw himself to the ground as well, screaming in pain as he attempted to snuff the fire eating away at his flesh._

_At the end of the hallway behind the thrashing vampire, she stood. Her gown billowed around her, shimmering in the dim light of the tomb vampires' safehouse._

_A rush of fear swept over him. The place was swarming with vengeful vampires, and there was Bonnie, standing motionless and watching him._

_With a swoop, he snatched up the stake and plunged it into the heart of the man it had belonged to. He climbed to his feet as grey veins formed a deathly veil across the man's features._

_In a flash, Damon stood before the witch. "What the hell do you think you're doing here?"_

_She smirked. "Pretty sure I'm saving your life, Salvatore."_

_He wasn't amused._

_Seeing his stern expression, she sighed. "Elena told me what happened to Stefan, and we came to help. We already got him out of the basement, she's leading him back to the car."_

_"You got Stefan?"_

_She nodded._

_"Alright, Witchy. Let's get you out of here."_

_They had almost reached the front door when he heard her gasp. Faster than she could register what was happening, she was ripped away from him by the arm and thrown against the wall of the foyer. Fangs brushed her neck just before the creature attacking her fell away._

_Damon stood behind it, holding its heart. Bonnie looking at him strangely, rubbing her arm._

_"Come on." They hurried outside together, and rain poured ruthlessly down onto them from angry skies above._

_She ran ahead of him. Once they were in the woods and clear away from the house, he rushed up behind her. He spun her around to face him as her back slammed into a tree trunk._

_His face loomed inches from her own. "Are you crazy or just stupid?" he demanded. "What were you doing back there?"_

_She stared back at him steadily. "I was doing what needed to be done."_

_His eyes searched hers, wild and frantic. "Anything could have happened to you!"_

_"Well, nothing did! You know I can handle myself. After all we're fine, aren't we?" She glared at him._

_He wanted to say that no, they weren't. She wasn't fine at all, she was dead. Instead he kissed her, pressing into her so that her body was pushed against the tree trunk._

_Her lips met his with a matched sense of urgency._

_His hand trailed down her side before finding its way to one of her breasts, kneading the mound and feeling her nipple pebble beneath his palm as his knee parted her thighs. Their clothing was soaked from the rain, chilly and clinging._

_Her leg slid up to wrap around his hip, and he hooked her thigh with a firm hand, pulling her flush against him. His stiff erection twitched in his jeans as his body met the wet, needy warmth of her core._

_He grunted as her fingers found their way to the taxed zipper of his jeans, mercifully freeing his dick at once. He bucked into her, shoving her harder against the rough bark, as her grip slid firmly up and down the length of his shaft._

_"Fuck, Bonnie," he groaned. He saw her smile, just slightly, as if to herself. He captured that smile with his own mouth, kissing her hard._

_His hands gripped her waist, pushing her up higher against the trunk. Her legs wrapped around him as she was lifted off the ground. The hem of her gown fluttered from where it was pushed up by the force of the motion._

_He positioned himself at her entrance, running the head of his cock along her hot, wet folds. She moaned into his lips._

_He pulled his mouth away from her, a question in his icy blue eyes. The moment she nodded, he was sheathed completely inside of her. She cried out, throwing her head back._

_Trickling rain ran down the supple skin of her neck as he set a brutal pace, thrusting into her. The rushing blood beneath that skin called to him, but the beautiful sound of her moans pulled him back. He peppered her neck with hot, bruising kisses, his lips running over the wet strands of hair that stuck to her._

_Her hands dragged through his hair, tugging fiercely._

_He plunged into her again and again, the heat of their friction chasing away the chill of the rain._

_She inhaled a shaky, ragged breath and moaned, "Damon..."_

_Her voice wrenched him free of his frenzy, and he trailed his lips back to her face, watching as her heavily lidded eyes found his. His thrusts came slower, languorous. _

_He felt her heels digging into his lower back. Her arms wrapped around his neck as she rolled her hips to meet his rhythm. His hand traced from her navel down to the bundle of nerves at her center that begged for his attention._

_His fingers rubbed circles around her clit as he fucked her slowly. Her breathing was divine, hitching and echoing shallow as her lips tickled the shell of his ear._

_He felt her muscles clenching around him. "Come on, Bonnie. Come for me."_

_His words pushed her tumbling over the edge. He groaned to feel her pussy spasming around him as he continued his ministrations and her body shuddered in his arms. He followed her over the edge soon after._

**When he woke up in** the morning, Bonnie was gone. She left nothing but a chill on the sheets beside him.

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**A/N: Hi guys! We actually made it a full week between updates for once. You can thank moving for that, it is not fun!**

**Really hope you all liked the chapter! Hope the discussion in the middle about Bonnie's sacrificial lambness wasn't too convoluted, I kind of felt like they were arguing about 3 different things at once, lol.**

**Just as a heads up, we only have a few chapters more to go. That might seem sudden, but believe me... when the things happen, ALL THE THINGS HAPPEN. Thank you guys for sticking with me this long!**

**For the guest reviewers! Guest1: **Yesss! So glad you're enjoying the flashbacks, they're usually my favorite part to write, too! Thank you :D,** Jacal**: "Authoress," oh maaan I love that! Definitely stealing it (; Hope you liked the new chapter!,** Guest2: **Thank you! :D

**Please R&R, lovelies! Time for me to go back to unpacking ): SIGH! Love you guys!**


	11. 11 Can't Escape This Now

_**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**_

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Imagine Dragons – Demons, Tonic - Wicked Soldier**_

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**Damon watched the ice swirl** in sloshing circles in his nearly empty tumbler. Alaric had convinced him to leave the confines of the boardinghouse for one night, enticing him to the Grill with promises of free alcohol.

"You do get that we're on kind of a time crunch with this witch resurrection thing, right?"

Alaric shrugged. "You and Bonnie have been at it for weeks now. You needed a night off." He leaned forward to rest his elbows on the bar. "Besides, wouldn't want you to go all Jack Torrance on us."

Damon rolled his eyes. "Bonnie's no Lloyd the bartender." He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip before realizing it was mostly melted ice that remained. "Though really, now that I'm thinking about it, she might be more like that lady in the bathtub."

Alaric raised an eyebrow. "You might not want to mention that to her, that was like the most horrifying scene in the whole movie."

"I meant just the hot one, obviously," the vampire scoffed.

Alaric sneered, turning to locate their own completely corporeal bartender. Damon stared into his glass again.

His friend was right, though. They had been trying to bring Bonnie back for weeks, almost two months in fact. Yet it seemed they were no nearer to it than they had been the first time she had whispered into his ear at dusk in the quarry.

But Damon knew something about patience.

He dragged a hand through his hair. He wasn't always a good man, and he was a wise man even less often than that, but he was always a man who was relentless in the pursuit of what he wanted. And as the days wore on, the only thing left that Damon wanted was Bonnie, alive.

She had been "sleeping" in his bed ever since the night he had asked her to stay. He didn't want to imagine that not continuing after she was back. He didn't want to imagine their trysts in his dreams not being reflected someday in his living world.

He would never let her go now. Bonnie Bennett would live again, and she would be his, no matter what.

_**The woods were eerily quiet.**__ Despite the cheerful sunlight dappling through the leaves above, there was no birdsong or any other sign of life that he could sense._

_He knew where he was, mere yards from the ruins of the tomb. What he didn't know was when. He couldn't recall ever visiting the tomb alone, as the midday sun shone so high and bright in the sky._

_He took heavy steps forward in his boots. The sere, withered leaves and brush below his feet crunched noisily._

_"Is someone there?" Her voice was faint and timid. _

_"Judgy? What are you doing out here?"_

_"I can't get out, I just... I don't know."_

_As he followed the nervous timbre of her voice, he found a wide depression in the forest floor. Bonnie was trapped in the sunken ruins._

_With a swoop, he swung down to land beside her. "Hi." He grinned._

_He stopped when he wasn't met by the rolling eyes he had expected. Instead, her eyes were wide as she stared at the heavy door behind him. Carved with a crude pentagram, he realized then that the eroded stone echoed with tortured, whispered groans. _

_"I can hear them."_

_He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her away from the entrance to the tomb. "It's fine, they're never getting out of there."_

_"Can we just go?" _

_He nodded. "Hold onto me."_

_She frowned, her arms sliding around his waist. "Should I close my eyes?"_

_"Never." He smirked at her. The barest beginnings of a smile graced her lips when he suddenly leapt upwards. Her startled hands gripped him tight, and he felt her heart thudding in her chest as they were propelled through the air. _

_He glanced down at her face as they landed roughly on solid ground, finding no trace of the fear he had expected. Instead, she was all breathless exhilaration. She laughed, leaning into him as she steadied herself on her own feet._

**A cool rush of electricity** pulsed through his side where she curled against him.

Her hair was splayed out over the pillow, and he watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest, curious to know if ghosts really needed to breathe. He wished he could hear her heartbeat.

"Grams thinks I'd make a good guardian someday, like Honoria Fell."

He turned to face her fully, propping his head up so that his elbow dug into his own pillow.

"Eternally meddling with a flair for violence and self-righteousness? Sounds about right, that would definitely suit you."

She glared up at him. "Don't make me set this bed on fire."

"Been there, done that." He winked.

She rolled her eyes, sighing. "This isn't working."

"What isn't?"

"Elijah's been too quiet. Sometimes when I try to spy on him, I can't find him at all."

"Did you check Men's Warehouse? Maybe he wanted to get a suit to match his suit and his suit. Or his suit."

She made a face. "I think he's setting up magical wards to block me somehow. He's up to something."

"Because he wears a lot of suits."

"I get it, Damon," she answered drolly. But he saw her smile before it faded again. "Maybe… maybe it's time we work on another way to stop him, and accept that I'm stuck here. I mean, that's the natural order of things at this point." Her lips set in a tense line as she stared down at the bedspread.

He looked at her hard before rolling onto his back and staring at the ceiling. "There is nothing natural about what happened to you," he stated matter-of-factly. "We're going to bring you back."

He could feel the chill of her fingertips tracing over his bare chest.

"You're right though, we need to take care of Dumb and Dumber. Would corpse-y Klaus be Jim Carrey or Jeff Daniels?"

"Damon, seriously." Her fingers grew still.

"Maybe Zora can destroy the amulet with magic, like you were going to. I'll call her in the morning."

He felt the trailing, circling taps resume over his skin and smiled.

"Definitely Jim Carrey," she offered.

_**He could feel her blood**__ as it hummed through his veins._

_She stood beside him in the darkness of night, stoic and silent. Together they watched the events unfold in the quarry._

_She saw him grimace as Klaus staked Stefan in the back, following the motion with a swift punch that caused the younger vampire to collapse helplessly to the ground. He saw her mouth grow tense in anger as the Original drew every last sanguine drop of blood from her best friend. When the doppelganger's body fell lifeless, they moved in._

_She gave him a slight nod as he split away to slink through the shadows while she stalked towards the hybrid in the open. She conjured storm, wind and flame in a furious display of gathering power._

_Distracted by the witch's entrance, Greta didn't even notice as the vampire slipped behind her. A quick twist, and the crack of her neck resonated in his ears. He made his way to his brother, wrenching the splintered wood from Stefan's back. As the younger Salvatore rushed to Elena's body, Damon made his way back to Bonnie's side._

_He observed in grim satisfaction as the newly born Original hybrid writhed and screamed in agony. Klaus scrambled backwards, trapping himself against the ring of rock and flame demarking the edge of the ritual grounds._

_Klaus didn't seem to notice the other Original until he towered over him. "Elijah?"_

_Damon realized how weakened Bonnie already was. She swayed slightly on her feet, and he frowned, gripping her arm to steady her._

_"Hello, brother." Elijah pressed down against the Hybrid's shoulder, wielding a dagger with his other hand. "In the name of our family, Niklaus - "_

_"I didn't bury them at sea! Spare me and you have my word, I will take you to them... Brother."_

_Both vampire and witch recognized the changing tide in the eyes of their supposed ally. Elijah looked back to them regretfully._

_Resigned disappointment furrowed heavily into Bonnie's brow for the slightest moment before her features were overtaken by an inhuman fury. He felt the sharp tug of her magic drawing from his own power through their bond._

_Klaus roared in pain for the last time, his eyes fading to a glassy nothingness as he gasped a final, unnecessary breath. Elijah's face twisted in an icy rage to see his every hope shattered._

_The Original swept towards the witch in a blur of motion, but Damon was already there, throwing himself between them. In that flash of a moment he saw the surprise in Elijah's eyes, which he returned with a fixed, triumphant glare._

_He felt her pressed safe against his back as he woke, Elijah's fingers ripping through his flesh._

**"So... this is my third** voicemail. It's kind of urgent, alright? I'm headed down there now. Call me, Foxy."

The next morning, Zora wasn't answering her phone. Still, he was on the freeway, careening towards Atlanta. He considered how many times he had made this drive in the past few months.

He decided that the next time he was involved in a life or death mission, he was going to choose a witch who lived closer to home.

Preferably one Bonnie Bennett, alive and well.

**The door swung open as** he stepped onto the porch, and Zora moved aside to let him in.

She offered him a tight smile. "I'm seeing more of you than I'm getting to see of my own grandchildren." She chuckled.

They sat at the kitchen table, but this time there was no opportunity for coffee or confections. He lifted the amulet out of his jacket pocket and set it on the blue tablecloth.

A flash of recognition vanished from the eyes of the witch as quickly as it had appeared. "This is a source of great power, Damon."

"I know, I can feel it. I don't know why, I couldn't before. Stefan still can't."

"It's probably because of your bond to Bonnie."

He nodded. That did make sense.

"Never attempt to access it, it's far too dangerous. Even Bonnie wouldn't have been able to handle it alone, and you don't have even a fraction of her channeling capabilities."

He shrugged. "Not on the menu. How do we destroy it?"

"That's not how it works. You can't just destroy this kind of energy, it was meant to be drawn out and channeled into another vessel. Which usually means some kind of spell."

The corners of his eyes crinkled thoughtfully as he stared at the talisman.

The witch hesitated. "Though… there might be one way. May I?"

He pushed the amulet across the table, the delicate chain dragging across the pale blue fabric. She lifted it with gentle fingers, almost reverently, climbing to her feet.

As she wandered into one of the back rooms of the house, Damon trailed behind her.

"I really do wish there was another way. I've grown to like this new you, Damon."

He stopped, puzzled. "What?"

The word had barely left his lips when he felt the pressure spiking in his skull. The crippling aneurysm brought him to his knees, and he recognized the glaze of compulsion in the witch's eyes as he slipped into unconsciousness.

_**Everything was a blur. He**__ felt the chill of cold stone beneath him, through his clothing._

_Slivers of light were painful on his skin, and he shrunk back into the shadows, moaning. He felt the familiar ache of vervain running through his body, and the accompanying weakness weighed heavily upon his limbs as he moved._

_"Bonnie…" His voice was a rasping whisper, his head tilting back as he called out to her._

_A vague silhouette wrapped in white appeared before him, the hazy edges of her gown reminding him of a cloud, floating closer and closer._

_He felt her hand on his cheek, her fingers running softly from cheekbone to jaw. "Damon."_

_Her voice sounded so far away, garbled as if she was underwater. Or perhaps he was underwater._

_"Damon, you have to wake up."_

**His eyes opened, and he** found himself collapsed in the doorway of Zora's kitchen. The witch was nowhere to be seen.

He could have kicked himself. How did he not realize she was compelled? Idiot!

He stood and brushed his palms against his thighs, shaking dust off of his clothes. When he looked up again, Bonnie was before him.

"Good, you're awake. I followed her, she's driving north… she just hit North Carolina." Her voice was measured and steady, but he could hear the strain of worry in it.

He frowned. "Seriously? How long was I out?"

"She's kind of a lead foot." Bonnie winced. "I'm going back to keep an eye on her. This has to be Elijah. We can't let her finish whatever he's making her do."

"I know, I'm on it." Damon whipped out his phone as Bonnie disappeared. He stalked out Zora's front door, letting it slam behind him. "Little brother, I need you to intercept a wicked witch."

**Stefan finally spotted the grey** Camry as it roared down the empty freeway towards him. He wished for the millionth time that he had the advantage of drinking human blood.

As it raced past him, he rushed behind it. Eventually he picked up enough speed to catch up.

He wrenched the passenger side door off its hinges and threw himself into the seat, feeling a strange chill but having no time to consider what that could mean.

He glanced at Zora to see her staring at him in dull anger. He leaned towards her, managing to twist the wheel just as a wave of aneurysms began to batter his brain. The car swerved into the median.

Zora tried to right the course of the vehicle and keep the vampire incapacitated at the same time, but she soon lost control of the car. In a mess of squealing tires and crunching metal, the Camry fishtailed into a stomach-churning spin that launched it across four lanes towards the shoulder. Hitting a dip there, the car's momentum threw it into a roll. Unbuckled Stefan was tossed painfully against the roof.

Finally the sedan came to a stop upside-down nearly 50 yards from the road.

Groaning, Stefan looked over to the unconscious witch. Her airbag was deployed, and blood from a gash on the side of her face pooled into her hair.

He realized he shouldn't move her. Struggling to keep his bloodlust in check, the vampire slithered out the crushed passenger side.

As he dialed 911 and waited for the operator to pick up, he knelt once more to reach into the car. He slipped the amulet from her purse.

**When Damon finally arrived at** his brother's new home in Greenville, Stefan stood on the porch waiting for him.

He had stayed to make sure the ambulance came. "They're taking her to the hospital." He held out the talisman, handing it to the older vampire.

"Is she alright?"

Stefan nodded. "Out like a light, but she'll recover. We'll need to figure out what to do about the compulsion though."

Damon opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted by the steady buzz of his phone. He glanced at the screen and saw that it was Alaric.

"It's not really a good time, Rick."

"How right you are." Elijah's voice crooned smoothly on the other end.

"What the hell do you want?"

"I'm calling to chastise you for your treatment of that poor witch, I thought it quite obvious. You and your brother seem to have a terrible track record with witches."

Damon's jaw clenched. He wouldn't give the Original any satisfaction by responding to that. "Let's try this another way. Why do you have Alaric's phone?"

"You must mean your vulnerable human friend. He's a little too dead to chat at the moment. If this gaudy bauble does its job, he may be more amenable by the time you arrive at the quarry. With the talisman." _Click._

"Fuck!"

Damon sprinted towards his car, and he didn't protest when his brother followed.

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**A/N: Things! Happening! Hope you liked the chapter. (:**

**Thank you guys sooooo much for all of your reviews and messages and feedback! It's been fantastic hearing from you guys and chatting with you, both about the story and just random stuff too. I feel so lucky :D**

**I'm going to keep this note short because I have all these impulses to give hints and explain things that would spoil stuff and it's getting harder and harder to keep my mouth shut, LOL. But I will, I promise!**

**For the guest reviewers! Kaykay: **Aww, thank you! :D**, bamonfan: **Haha, sorry! It was somewhat sudden, but then heightened emotions and proximity and rain and just… (; I couldn't help myself. LOL. Bonnie's usually considered so much more put together than Damon, but I think her unflinching self-sacrifice is actually something that needs to be better addressed, especially by the show. I'm thinking that between Damon's words and her kind of shocking herself by the lengths she's gone to in this story (ie. the possession), she may slowly come to realize that even she needs to have some limits. Aaaghhh thank you so much for your words! I'm so glad you're loving Damon. "Lost cause" is the perfect description of Plec's Damon. So sad, there is so much potential that's just being squandered. Okay this got really long, lol. Hope you liked the new chapter!

**Please R&R, love you guys! :D**


	12. 12 What We Lived For

**A/N: Quick note from me up here because you aren't going to hear from me again until this is all over.**

**Just wanted to mention that I was under the impression that Originals could compel any supernatural, and the only reason people aren't getting compelled left and right in MF is that they're all on vervain. But given the veritable flood of reviews and PMs I got, I'm pretty well convinced I was wrong about that, lolol. (By the way, I had no idea that the way to get lurking readers to talk to me was to mess stuff up. Definitely tempted to mess a lot more stuff up now! Just kidding, I love you guys, you keep me honest :D )**

**Anyway, lucky for me, this story is AU. So I can take the easy way out and say that in this version of TVD land, Originals can theoretically compel any supernatural not under the influence of vervain. I'm sincerely sorry if it took any of you too far out of the story, it truly was unintentional. But we need it to stay, so easy way out it is (: Onto the chapter, then.**

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_**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**_

_**Chapter Soundtrack: Audioslave - Like a Stone, Alison Krauss – You Will Be My Ain True Love**_

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**The sun had dipped below** the horizon some time ago. The powder blue Camaro sped over rain-slicked roads, headlights beaming into the darkness ahead. The Salvatore brothers raced towards the quarry where so much had already been destroyed.

After a brief rundown of the events that led to the kidnapping and hopefully temporary murder of their vampire hunter friend, Damon and Stefan sat in tense silence. Stefan was still digesting all of the new information, and Damon was battling the low hiss of fear or possibly guilt that was building in his head.

When he glanced into the rear-view mirror, he nearly startled to see Bonnie sitting in the back seat.

"Any news, Witchy?"

Stefan looked around, confused. He had felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck, but couldn't see the recipient of Damon's attention anywhere.

"Zora's fine. They're keeping her in the hospital for a few days, so that buys us a little time to figure out what to do about the compulsion."

"Turns out we've got bigger fish to fry." The strain was evident in his voice.

She frowned. "What happened?"

"Elijah has Alaric. He wants the talisman."

"Shit." Her eyes flitted to and fro in rapidly growing panic. "Shit, shit, shit."

Under any other circumstance, hearing the tight-laced Bonnie Bennett curse would have been extremely entertaining for the vampire.

"I'm stuck here, I can't do anything! How did we let this happen? How did we run out of time?" He had never heard her so frantic. Bonnie's usual unflappable resolve seemed to completely falter in that moment.

"Hey, look at me." Green eyes snapped up worriedly to meet blue in the rear-view mirror. "We're going to figure something out."

Stefan watched his brother quietly. Even though he was only catching half of the conversation, he was struck by it. This was a side of his brother he had never seen, not even in their human days.

Bonnie shook her head. "He's Alaric. You can't let Elijah hurt him, I get it. If Elijah wants the amulet, then... you have to. I just, I can't _do_ anything." She wrung her hands, her gaze sweeping back and forth again. She grimaced. "I can't just watch, how am I supposed to just sit here and… Maybe if there was a witch to do the original spell I could - "

"Bonnie, _stop_. I'm not going to let Klaus come back, not any more than you would. Listen to me, we're going to fix this. It's not just you, you're not dealing with this alone."

She grew still. After a moment, her eyes caught his in the mirror again, and she gave him a slow nod.

"They're at the quarry," he explained.

"Elijah has a twisted sense of humor." Her voice was quiet, significantly steadier than before. "I'll go scope it out."

As she began to fade away, he felt the icy brush of her lips against his temple. "Thank you, Damon." The words whispered from somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind. He felt some of the tension between his shoulder blades melt.

"She's gone?" Stefan asked, after a few minutes of silence.

Damon nodded, the movement terse as the pressure began to creep back in.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me about all of this before. This is huge, Damon."

"Or... let's _not_ have this conversation right now," the elder Salvatore muttered.

Stefan looked at his brother, reading his anxiety. "He has his ring, he'll be okay."

"Rings can be removed," Damon snapped. "Haven't we sacrificed enough people for these douchebag Originals?"

"You mean Bonnie?"

Damon didn't answer, staring fixedly through the windshield onto the dark road ahead.

Stefan couldn't help the chuckle that escaped his lips.

"What could possibly be amusing here?"

"Nothing, it's just strange that you're her champion now. A year ago, you were offering to write her a nice eulogy."

Damon's grip on the steering wheel tightened considerably. "Things change."

Stefan shook his head, his eyes soft. "No, things didn't change. You did."

A muscle in Damon's jaw twitched.

They rode in silence for some time after that. Stefan stole glances at his brother, noticing that he checked the rear-view mirror repeatedly, growing increasingly edgy each time he didn't find what he was looking for.

Finally, Stefan spoke again. "So what's the plan then?"

"Has having a plan ever helped us in any way before? Let's just wing it."

Stefan frowned, turning to his brother. "Sounds like you're going to do something reckless."

Damon smirked, but it didn't reach his eyes.

**Of course it would end** here. It always had to end here.

There was no flame or wind or lightning to herald their arrival at the quarry this time. The brothers trudged through dust and stone towards a gathering of dark figures. The silhouettes were eerily still, waiting for them.

As they approached, Stefan could see that most of the figures were arranged in a circle. With his enhanced vision, he could see the glassiness of compulsion in their eyes. In the center, Elijah loomed beside both the bodies of his own brother and their friend.

Stefan glanced at Damon, who had grown even more irritable and stressed when Bonnie had not returned. The elder Salvatore stared without overt emotion at the body of the vampire hunter.

When they came to a stop a short distance from the Original, Stefan noticed that Alaric began to stir. He heard his brother exhale.

Elijah strode forward towards them, stepping between two of the still figures. "I would welcome you to our little fete, but I'm afraid your invitations were of necessity, not for the pleasure of your company. The amulet, please." He looked towards Damon expectantly, tilting his head to one side.

Damon reached into his pocket and hooked the chain of the amulet with his fingers, allowing the pendant to swing freely as he lifted it into view. "Oh, this old thing? I've grown pretty fond of it. Actually, I think I may just keep it."

Stefan watched as the fingers of Damon's other hand grasped the locket lightly, almost timidly.

Elijah gave a slight nod. "I thought you might feel that way." In a flash of motion, he had Stefan by the collar. He stared intensely into the vampire's eyes and intoned, "You will sit here without moving, like the well-mannered child you ought to be, and watch while I kill your brother."

When the Original released his shirt, Stefan grimaced and fell shakily to the ground, his legs tucked beneath him. He glared up at Elijah, struggling to stand again and failing against the compulsion. He cursed his oversight, as during the hectic rush of the day he had missed his daily dose of vervain.

The Original turned to face Damon, taking casual strides towards him as he spoke. "I'm not really the sort to monologue, you know. That was more Klaus' territory. So allow me to cut to the chase." He stopped a few feet from the elder Salvatore. "My witches," he continued, motioning to the figures surrounding them, "have warded this place to mute and bind the dead Bennett girl. There will be no tricks this time."

That was why Bonnie had never returned, Damon realized. She was there with him, watching, unable to do anything. Something clenched in his chest to know what she must be feeling. He wouldn't let her down.

"You cannot beat me, Damon. Let's not be foolish." Elijah smiled, just barely, gazing at the vampire.

"Foolish would be parting with this amount of silver in this economy. Have you even been watching the market?"

The words were hardly out of his mouth before Elijah rushed towards him.

Seeing the Original advancing, Stefan tried again to stand, but to no avail. He watched helplessly as Elijah's fist connected with his brother's jaw, causing his body to fly backwards and slam hard into the slab of rock where Klaus had once drained Elena. He crumpled to the ground, the amulet clutched tight in his hand.

"I rarely take pleasure in the monstrous acts we commit, not for many a century now. But I am going to enjoy killing you." Elijah cracked his neck with a jerk of his head and stalked slowly towards Damon. "Any last words?"

As he climbed painfully to his feet, Damon's eyes met the younger Salvatore's. "I'm sorry, baby bro." He winked.

Stefan watched in confusion as Damon closed his eyes, holding the amulet with both hands. With a focused tug of his mind, Damon began to draw the power out of the talisman, taking it into himself as a vessel.

Elijah's eyes widened in shock. "No!" He lunged forward to attack Damon, but a surge of energy threw him back.

Light suffused Damon's body, and he could feel the power gathering inside of him, writhing and flowing and threatening to tear open his skin.

Damon absently wondered what Bonnie would think of what he was doing. He wanted to believe she would have been proud of him, but he figured she'd probably just be mad. Witches were such twisted little things.

Still, he was surprised at how much peace he felt, as the energy ripped through him. He knew what he was giving up, but for once he had no regrets about his decision. For once he didn't feel helpless, like he had no choice but to do the wrong thing. In fact, he knew he was doing the _right_ thing. Knowing Bonnie was what gave him that clarity, he realized as a swell of gratitude washed over him. The sensation nearly overpowered his painful awareness of the magic streaking violently through his veins.

And so it was true. Bonnie Bennett was dead, and Damon Salvatore was not the same.

He felt a gentle movement against his fingertips and opened his eyes to see Bonnie's hand in his own. Too overwhelmed by the magic coursing through him to speak, he smiled. She had siphoned enough power from their bond to break through the wards.

She had so much energy flowing through her that he could actually feel her, as soft and warm as she had been when she was alive.

He was happy that he got to feel her again, he hadn't expected that.

Her skin was luminous with the same pure light that he felt inside himself. He could sense the power rushing out of the talisman violently, ripping through them both as her fingers laced firmly with his own.

Everything was muted by the overwhelming roar of that energy. He watched as Bonnie directed what she could towards Elijah, the palm of her free hand extended and curling towards the Original. He could feel as she struggled to wrangle the feral magic. He couldn't even hear Elijah's cries over the roar of the energy flying through and around him.

The Original vampire collapsed to the rocky quarry ground, his limbs bent oddly as Bonnie broke his bones. Elijah's pomp and coolness had disappeared. He struggled to scramble away from the torment, but their magic seemed to have him pinned.

With a final shudder, Elijah's eyes stilled, as dull and glassy and devoid of life as his brother's had been a year ago in nearly the exact same spot.

As a shocked and completely awake Alaric crawled towards him, Stefan knew that Elijah's death meant that he should be able to move again. But he was too transfixed to even try.

He could see her. He could see Bonnie and Damon, joined together as the blinding energy continued to rage through them. He watched in awe as it escaped in bursting beams of light from their very pores.

Bonnie felt Damon's grip loosen on her hand. She turned to find his whole body taut, held aloft by nothing less than the vast magic pouring from the amulet. His eyes glowed sightlessly with bright white light.

"No, no no," she murmured, closing her eyes and focusing on drawing as much power away from him as she could.

But it wasn't enough.

Damon could vaguely hear his brother's voice, calling his name over the din of the rushing power. But his vision was searing white, and all he could feel was scorching heat, inside him and all around.


	13. 13 Epilogue

_**Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or anything affiliated with the Vampire Diaries or really much of anything at all in general. The most depressing disclaimer.**_

_**Chapter Soundtrack: **__**Pan's Labyrinth - A Princess, Mumford & Sons – After the Storm**_

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**And then all was still.**

Or so it seemed. Eventually he became conscious of the fact that he was drifting, tossed lullingly to and fro on a soft and gentle sea. An all-encompassing darkness swathed him like a cocoon, holding him safe in a state of indistinct suspension.

Quiet humming echoed around him, filling him with a sense of calm and yet touched by a wordless yearning.

He opened his eyes.

Her face was the first thing he saw. She was bent over him, her fingers careful and warm against his cheek.

The humming stopped when she noticed that he was awake. "Damon?"

He whispered, his voice hoarse, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't bring you back."

Grasping the fabric of his shirt in her hands, she pulled him up to her. She pressed her lips against his. They were as soft as they had been in his dreams, and he surrendered to her familiar scent as it wrapped soothingly around him.

She broke the kiss but did not pull away, and he felt her breath fan over his lips. "You talk too much, Damon."

He blinked at her, realizing in that moment that she'd said those words before, and exactly what that meant.

He sat up fully, drawing her into his arms. His lips found hers once more. He reveled in how warm she was. Even in his dreams, he hadn't quite felt her fully. Not like this.

He slid the straps of her gown off of her shoulders, bending to take one of her nipples into his mouth as it was exposed. He laved the hardening nub with his tongue, reaching for her other breast as she slipped into his lap, straddling his hips.

He heard her gasp as he caressed his hands down her back, pushing the bunched fabric of her gown along with them. He cupped her ass in both palms and pulled her flush to him, dragging her hot core against the hard length in his pants.

Her fingers already brushed his waistband, making short work of the button and zipper and allowing his dick to escape those ever tightening confines. She grasped the base of it before drawing her hand along his shaft, swiping the head with her thumb. He hissed against her skin, sucking harder on her nipple in response.

His fingers trailed down her torso to find the delicate folds at her center, glistening with her arousal. He brought his drenched fingers to her lips, allowing her to taste herself before capturing her mouth with his to have a taste as well.

He slipped one of his still wet fingers inside of her, and his dick twitched to hear her moan into his kiss. When he began to pump his finger in and out, she matched his rhythm with her hand wrapped firmly around his slick shaft.

She cried out and ground her hips down into his diligent hand when he added a second digit to the motion and circled her clit with his thumb.

"I need you, Damon," she breathed, her lips peppering frantic kisses along his jaw. "I need you inside me."

He removed his fingers and she groaned at the loss, but soon his hands were firm on her waist as she brought his cock to her center. He felt the head of it press into those warm folds, and he pulled her down, slow but deep. She gasped as he filled her, clinging to him as she buried her face in the crook of his neck.

This was literally his heaven now, he realized. He lifted her up before bringing her back down, plunging deeper into her with each thrust. Her pussy was warm, so warm, and tight around him.

Her arms wrapped around his neck, and he pulled her close, feeling her breasts pressing against his chest as he guided her up and down on his shaft.

When she finally came, his name was on her lips, and he knew that he would keep her forever.

**In time, Stefan and the** Gilbert siblings moved into the boardinghouse. Though Elena was afraid at first that Stefan would drown in his grief for his brother, the last moments that the two men had shared had forced the younger Salvatore to acknowledge that something new had awoken in Damon. Something that, while it did not ease the pain of his passing, gave Stefan an understanding that he had not expected.

Damon and Bonnie's portraits were added to the mantle, flanking the placid image of Marie Salvatore.

Alaric visited on occasion, and Stefan attempted to play the part of drinking buddy to moderate success. All in all, the rag-tag family, once known as the scoobies and now a few members short, took care of each other as best they could.

Items and furniture sometimes appeared to be inexplicably moved around in the boardinghouse, and sometimes they would hear vague laughter and conversation in the dark of night. Though they never admitted it to one another, they each took comfort somehow in the possibility that Bonnie and Damon were still with them.

Mystic Falls remained ever the same, its shiny small town facade gleaming not quite bright enough to completely obscure the shadow of death and violence at its core. But not every shadow in the cursed town was so ominous.

Sometimes, when teenagers would make their way to the secret makeout spots around the quarry, they would swear they could see an ethereal woman wearing a white dress escorted through the mist along the edge of the distant cliffs by the spectre of a man in black. The ghostly guardians of Mystic Falls.


	14. 14 Author Ramblings

**Final A/N: **So I'm legitimately afraid that all or most of you hate me now. Even if you are really mad at me, I hope that you stuck with me through to the end. The last paragraph of the epilogue was my starting point, my entire reason for writing this story to begin with... and also why I struggled a lot over the course of writing it as I realized that everyone was increasingly invested in seeing Bonnie alive again.

I almost chickened out a few times. I asked some (far more talented than I am) writer friends for advice though, and they all made the point that I should write the story that I intended to tell. I feel like this is that story. When you have tragic characters like Bonnie Bennett and Damon Salvatore, I feel like even a happy ending (as I hope you'll agree with me that this is) would be tinged by sadness and loss.

I really hope you liked the story (: Thank you guys so much for sticking with this and for being so awesome. I'm really new to fanfic and fandom in general, and you guys seriously blew me away. Love you guys!

Onto more of my babbling, feel free to skip all this entirely, lol.

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**Explanation of the dreams (aka, I Have Way Too Much Time On My Hands):**

The dreams started out as a way for Damon to explore his regrets, as this was something he wasn't very capable of doing on a conscious level. He was able to relive these pivotal yet sometimes seemingly banal moments between the two of them, and he was able to in his own way try to do things right the second time around, whether that was by being more open with his feelings and apologizing to dream!Bonnie, or by avoiding whatever line of action put her in danger in the first place, etc.

The dreams changing had two components, in my opinion. First, the dreams changed because Damon was changing. As Damon's feelings for Bonnie grew stronger, and as Damon grew more accustomed to acting in ways that were "noble" for lack of a better term, his dreams became more dramatic because his subconscious was reflecting that he had much more to lose when Mason was shoving his fist into Bonnie's chest, or when Bonnie was bleeding out on the floor. So as his character progressed, his perception of those past events changed as well. Not only was there regret there for the mistakes he had made, there was a level of fear for what was lost and what he may have yet had to lose, particularly in terms of his strange relationship with Bonnie.

The second reason that the dreams changed was Bonnie. I wanted to leave it up to reader interpretation as much as possible, since Bonnie's actions in the dreams could have conceivably been caused by the workings of Damon's grief-addled subconscious. But in my mind, (and sort of revealed in the epilogue) Bonnie did have some influence on his dreams, and at the very least she was able to witness them. As their bond (both the blood bond and their emotional bond) strengthened, her power over his dreams changed as well. What began as vague messages could come across with greater clarity. Situations could arise that took him off-guard where she had more control over the arc of the dream than him, such as her first kissing him. Though that was partly his influence too if you ask me.

There was also the eventual addition of the fact that he wanted to save her: at first he was completely helpless and he couldn't at all, basically forced to watch her die over and over, but eventually as he himself changed, he had greater success with it (the dream with Little!Bonnie was the first time he really saved her).

All in all, the dreamscape was Damon's but at the same time it belonged to both of them. It was their space to work out the changes happening in their dynamic without the usual defenses and self-consciousness that comes with living (or "living") in the waking world. I'm hoping that some or any of that came across in the writing, but if not then I hope the dreams were fun to read anyway. LOL


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